Zaldrīzo ānogar
by AlwaysEatTheRude21
Summary: Across the Narrow sea, Viserys and Daeron Targaryen fight for their lives in a pit of poison, plots and persecution. A brother dead from rebellion, mother lost to her birthing bed, and a father slain on the steps of his throne, it seemed they were the last of their House. Then their sister come tumbling out the sky astride a great silver dragon. Viserys/Fem!Harry/Male!Daenerys.
1. Chapter 1

**Tags: **A divergent story sprouting from my other, earlier work, The Jade Dragon, which doesn't have to be read to understand this fic. Gender-bent story. Told through a series of interconnected drabbles. Male!Daenerys. Fem!Harry. Targaryen!Harry. Triad Fic. Slow burning. Incest (brothers and sisters). Blood and gore. Morally grey characters doing morally grey things. Heavy Targaryen focus. Strong AU. Heavily messed with canon, both for Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.

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**Full Summary: **Across the Narrow sea, Viserys and Daeron Targaryen fight for their lives in a pit of poison, plots and persecution. Two brothers dead from rebellion, mother lost to her birthing bed, and a father slain on the steps of his throne, it seemed they were the last of their once grand House. Then their little sister come tumbling out the sky astride a great silver dragon, and everything changed. Haraella Targaryen, fresh from war, driven by dreams of a lemon tree, a red door, and boys with bright lilac eyes, fled England on the tail end of a storm with nothing but her wits, wand, and the Iron Belly she had rescued from Gringotts. She had only meant to find a place that felt like home, instead, she discovered something immensely more precious. Love.

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**Pairings:**

**Viserys/Fem!Harry/Male!Daenerys.**

**Fem!Jon Snow/Aegon VI.**

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**PROLOGUE:**

**The Kinder Way. **

* * *

_Haraella Targaryen's P.O.V_

Haraella Targaryen didn't remember much of her parents. Only a wash of sensations that tickled across her skin like feathers gliding across prickled flesh. Almost a caress. Almost a flair. Almost a memory.

Almost but never quite.

Black marbled dragons, Haraella thought she saw when she, sometimes, closed her eyes at night and tried, tried so hard, to reach that hazy skyline of times long passed. If they ever existed to begin with. Memory was funny that way, especially memories formed years ago before one had learned how to speak.

Imagination had the tendency to crawl in at the edges and fill in the blanks. It was hard to tell what was real and what wasn't when recollections were tainted by the hopes and dreams of an orphaned child starving in a under stairs cupboard desperate, so fuckin' desperate, for love and family.

Dreams had been all she had.

And a name.

Targaryen.

Still, Haraella thought she remembered their wings, these colossal stone dragons standing vigil at a hollowing door. Flaring, broad, arcing. She remembered their colours most. Red and black and glistening. Jewelled and gilded. Proud. Magnificent. Sometimes, they turned to ash before her, sallow, rotting, blowing away in the wind before she could reach out and touch them.

Nightmares nipping at her heels with antlers for a crown.

She didn't understand her dreams most of the time. A messy mixture of reality, imagination, and metaphor. She dreamt of volcanoes exploding until the skies themselves bled red with fire and heat. She dreamt of a man, as silver haired as she, with a circlet of square rubies, grinning at her. She dreamt of fields of sapphire roses smothered by rolling sands. A woman, beautiful, adorned in Arabic silks, pounding at a mountain that snatched the babe at her chest and devoured it whole. She dreamt of snow, and ice, and death slinking through red leafed trees, glass hands reaching.

She dreamt and dreamt and dreamt.

Yet, she tried to remember a time before she was dumped in the forbidden forest at a year and a half old. A time before James Potter and Lily Potter had found her squawking in the dark like a broken baby bird fallen from a nest, in the midst of war, and took her in as their own. The girl with snow for hair and jade for eyes, bathed in blood, and completely, utterly alone in the world.

Haraella thought she might remember a song. Hummed. Bustled. Purred. A woman's voice, serene and gentle, a siren in the void. Haraella would croon it to herself sometimes. Rarely. When she was sure no one was listening.

_Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray. Stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day. Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray. Soothe the wrath and tame the fury, teach us all a kinder way._

It was almost ironic how much that simple song had stayed her own hand in the war.

Made her fight for the kinder way.

Mostly, Haraella didn't remember sight or sound. She remembered touch. An embrace. Safe. Warm. A silver storm with silver rain… Or was it silver hair fluttering in her face? An embrace, a lopsided smile, a twirl, whirling, spinning through her memory. A tower of salt and smoke and storm, a bloodstained bed, a dying woman's last smile.

Once upon a time, someone had held Haraella Targaryen. Someone had kept her safe and warm. Far away, long ago, Haraella Targaryen had been loved and cherished. That ember of a memory, dim, faded, kept her hopeful through the dark days of her short life.

And the darker days yet to come.

When she died in that flash of putrid green with Tom Riddle's taunting face laughing at her, she first dreamt of a red door with a lemon tree, and a pair of smiling, lilac eyed boys calling her name. When she stood once more, raised from the dead, she thought she had her first taste of what felt like home.

* * *

xXx

Haraella laid upon the hillside and stared hard at the horizon, Vaenora coiled around her protectively. The war was over. She had won. She supposed Tom, in all his scheming and strategizing and soul splitting, had not thought she, a fourteen-year-old orphan girl, would come riding into battle on the back of a dragon.

More fool him.

She had, of course, done so. Perched on the bridled spine of Vaenora, the Iron Belly she had saved from Gringotts, she had burned it down. Ash and fire and blaze and slag, she had destroyed it _all_.

Hogwarts was nothing but a mound of molten stone now.

A soaring monument to a dragons wrath.

Tom hadn't known about Vaenora. No one had. They hadn't known Haraella had concealed her dragon in a cave in the forbidden forest, right where she had first been found so many years ago, hours before the final battle took place. Simply waiting for the right time. A right time that proved to be after she had died, the last of Tom's Horcruxes withered at her feet. He had not known until it was all too late and Haraella had come swooping in from the blackened sky, blazing, blistering, burning.

Sometimes, there was _no_ kinder way.

Sometimes, all there was _was_ fire and blood.

Sometimes a dragon had to _be_ a dragon.

Haraella had won the war, but, she thought, she may have lost a little part of herself. That childish naivety that thought war could be won in bloodless ways. An innocence of how the world worked. An unending belief that if one did good, tried to be good, then, in the end, all would work out fine.

It never did.

Sometimes, there was no happy ending.

She could still hear the deafening noise when she laid down at night and pretended she was sleeping.

So much screaming.

* * *

xXx

Haraella was staring at the horizon again, the scent of lemon niggling at her nostrils. When she blinked, she saw, ghosting on the back of her eyelids, a round, red door. She often looked to the sky, daydreamed in the shades and clouds. Ever since she could remember, she had been infatuated with flying.

Perhaps it was her love of dragons.

Perhaps it was a fantasy of freedom.

Perhaps it was nothing at all.

Yet, in tough times, when her heart grew heavy and the world seemed such a cruel, cruel place, Haraella turned her attention to the sky as she did so that day, standing by the window of the Minister of Magic's office, envisioning lemons and doors and bright lilac eyes.

The Minister was going to give her an Order of Merlin medal. _Her_. Haraella Targaryen. The girl who had burned down Voldemort in a blizzard of fire and fury. They called her a liberator. Protector of muggleborns. A saviour of the Wizarding world. The dragon whisperer. The white-scale champion. They had misread her rage as righteousness. Her vengeance as justice. Her retribution as a voice for those slain in their worst war.

They didn't see the ugly truth.

A child soldier just trying to survive.

She supposed that was trickier to swallow than the myth they had erected around her. A tomb of words and awards. The epics and poems, and complete fabrications. Haraella didn't exist here, not really. She was something else. Fools gold. A tool. An instrument. Something to use and abuse and ditch when needed.

That was her life.

She knew she could play along. She could pretend to be as they said she was. A good person who didn't burn down armies. Perhaps one day, she may even believe it herself. Perhaps she could be happy then. She would never know. As the Minister held out that shining medal, told her about the great things she would do for her kind and country, Haraella could feel the walls closing in. Brick by brick, nail by nail, she was being buried alive and no one could hear her weeping. Or, worse, they did, and no one cared.

She didn't want this.

She never wanted any of this.

They had made her into a monster, and now gave her a shiny nugget of gold for being a pet well trained.

She left Shacklebolt standing there, hand extended, medal gleaming in palm, frown plucking his eyebrows tight as she marched from the room in a flap of cloak and thud of thestral hide boot. She left Hermione in the atrium, shouting her name to her fleeing back. She left Ron waiting at the Weasley's, expecting her stopover. She left. Just left. She didn't look back.

Not once.

* * *

xXx

Rightfully, Haraella didn't know she wasn't going to return from that fateful flight until she was already halfway over the Atlantic. She told herself she needed air. A moment to breathe. Just a moment away, in the one place she had only ever found peace. The sky. Only, she kept going. Over London. Over the channel. Over the sea. A beat of a dragons wings echoing the frantic pounding of her heart.

Haraella couldn't stop.

It wasn't running away. Not truly. She had done her duty, had she not? She had won the war. Vanquished Voldemort. What more could they want from her? Everything. Sadly, Haraella had nothing else to give. They had taken all from her. Her family. Sirius. Remus. Dobby. Her childhood. Her happiness. Her innocence. Her life. Nevertheless, they wanted more. Always more. It was never enough.

It would never end.

So she flew. She flew, and flew, and flew, and she daydreamed of a lemon tree, a red door, and bright lilac eyes. Home_. _She dreamt of _home_. The one thing, just one, she had ever, selfishly, with the hunger only an orphan could truly know, wanted for herself. _Hers. _Not something a part of Albus's grand design. Not a shard of Tom Riddle's anger. Not belonging to some prophecy or divination. Just hers. Only hers.

The storm hit hours later, creeping upon her back. A rabid beast of wind and rain and lightning. She strove to out fly it. To dip beneath the dense cover of grey clouds and around the bend, away from the trundling darkness, but as swift as Vaenora was, the storm was swifter. It crashed upon them within minutes. A sleet of hissing rain and spitting bolts of lightning.

They say Lightning doesn't strike twice.

Haraella would agree.

She got struck three times before she and Vaenora fell from the sky.

Maybe this death was the kinder way.

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**A.N: **It's been nearly six months since I posted anything at all, and even longer since I posted anything on one of my big stories. For all my faithful readers, I am truly sorry for that. It's been a difficult year, and every time I've sat down to type something up, it just hasn't worked out. I know, rightfully, many of you would have preferred an update to one of my other stories, rather than a whole new one, but I'm trying to ease myself back into writing. I will get around to updating my older stories, at some point, however, at the moment, I just want to have some fun with it and try out new things. This side-story being one of them. Once again, sorry for those waiting for updates, they are coming eventually, and despite this not being an update, I hope you all enjoyed it as much.

That said, let me know what you think so far! And, hopefully, I shall see you all again soon. If you have a spare moment, drop a little review. Until next time, stay beautiful! ~_AlwaysEatTheRude21_


	2. Chapter 2

**Warnings for this chapter: **Mentions of rape and miscarriage, though not graphically depicted, so please be heedful if these are a trigger for you. I have tried to be as respectful as I can in this regard, but they are serious topics, and the last thing I ever want is to cause anybody any form of distress.

This fic is also told in a non-linear structure, so from drabble to drabble, chapter to chapter, time does jump around quite a bit. Most of the time, the drabbles are linked together in a rough theme/time-frame per chapter, but not all.

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**CHAPTER ONE: **

**Of Ballads and Bards and Bastards. **

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_Jaime Lannister's P.O.V_

Jaime Lannister, the young lion of Casterly Rock, was merely ten and five when he came to be a member of the famed Kingsguard. Ten and five. So young. The youngest ever received by the Kingsguard, in truth. _Too young_.

However, he did not see it that way in the beginning.

No.

In the beginning, it was nothing short of an honour. Pride engulfed him like wildfire. He, the distinguished heir of Tywin Lannister, golden cub to one of the greatest Houses to ever subsist upon the rocky shores of Westeros, was now a member of one of the most revered, renowned, and respected bands of men.

He would do great things, he knew. His name would be forever inscribed upon the many faces of history. Jaime Lannister, progeny to _the_ Tywin Lannister, knight and Kingsguard, protector and defender of the realm. It had a poetic and lyrical ring to it, one perfect for ballads, and that, naively, is how he saw his life going.

As a song from old.

The innocence hadn't lasted long.

It never does in the cesspit of King's Landing.

His father, Hand to the King, resigned from his post in a fit of fury from losing his heir to a celibate mandate. In his rally back to Casterly Rock, he took Jaime's sister, Cersei, with him. Cersei, his sweet sister, his love, gone. It wasn't supposed to be that way. They were meant to stay close, with him, not with half a league dividing them.

Yet, there was still hope. Hope to do great things. Hope that had kept the sting of losing his sister to a niggling nip that only truly flared to life at night in a cold, empty bed. He was, thankfully, still out of his marriage contract to that floundering fish, Lysa Tully. His sister may be gone, but he would see her again, his father could not stay from court for long if he wished to uphold the Lannister name in true Lannister fashion, and Jaime got to do all that which pleasured him so. Tourneys and contests, campaigns and quests.

This was what he was good at.

This was what he had been born to do.

Then King Aerys II butchered what little hope he had left.

The morn of Lord Walter Whent's tourney, the very day Jaime Lannister had taken his oath and been blessed as a Kingsguard in the light of the Seven, the King ordered him back to King's Landing, to play guard to Queen Rhaella and a young Prince Viserys, stealing away any chance Jaime had of participating in the tourney.

He did it with a smile upon his wretched face.

Keen.

Malevolent.

Jaime's childhood dreams of valour and honour soured on the arduous ride to King's Landing. Where he, a knight, would play wet nurse. He saw the truth then. That grotesque beast. He was not knighted for his character. He was not elevated into the Kingsguard for his escapades on the battlefield, or his moral exploits as a squire. It had all been in scorn. Crueller still, not even a slight to himself, but to his father. No heir, no glory, no triumph.

Just one man shaming another.

That was the day Jaime Lannister stopped believing in the ballads, and the little wonder he had left of the world shrivelled in the hollow shell of his gold plaited chest.

He didn't know the worst was still to come.

Perhaps if he did, he would never have gotten off his horse, and carried on riding right to the end of the world.

* * *

_Rhaella Targaryen's P.O.V_

Ser Bonifer Hasty, a landed knight from the minor House Hasty, was a good man. Tall and thin and pious, he was as the ballads sang of. Just and honourable, handsome and gentle. Everything Princess Rhaella Targaryen, in her youth, had dreamed about.

She first saw him when he was a lowly, but promising, tourney knight. Standing in the lists with his shimmering silver armour, decorated in the amethyst and white stripe of House Hasty, he seemed to be drenched in Targaryen hues, despite his prominent Stormland ruddiness.

She was infatuated immediately, as most young impressionable girls are when a beautiful man smiles her way. She thought, so long ago, he too was, perhaps, as enamoured with her as she was with him.

A true song, their love had been.

Immediate, passionate, and, of course, never meant to be.

Before her formal betrothal to her brother, Prince Aerys, Princess Rhaella had loved a knight. A _good_ knight. A good knight who, wearing her favour, a slip of crimson and onyx velvet, trounced all his competitors in the tourney, as if the Maiden herself extolled their chaste devotion. A good knight who, as all the best songs sung of, pranced around the tourney on a steed of pure white, and there, before all to see, crowned her the Queen of Love and Beauty.

Their affair of the heart was a short one. Short but so very sweet. Bonifer was of too low birth to ever be seriously considered a suitor for a Princess. A moon turn after the tourney, Rhaella was betrothed to her brother. Rhaella was no Duncan, she definitely was no Daemon, and charming, poor Bonifer was no Laena or Jenny, and so, she did what was expected of her.

She married her brother and only ever dreamed of her good knight and what could never be.

A life from the great songs just out of her reach.

It kept her going, through the ache and pain of what was to come. The memory of her Bonifer the Good. She never saw him again after her marriage in the Sept of Baelor. Not once. However, she did hear, through whispers and rumours and murmurs, he had taken solace in religion, finding only the Maiden could replace Rhaella in his heart.

She never forgot that summer love, fresh as spring, and unfortunately as fragile as it too.

Although she spoke nothing of Bonifer in the years to come, though she kept that memory close to her heart, hidden, buried, Rhaella would always favour a good knight.

Nonetheless, she would not find another for many more turns.

* * *

_Jaime Lannister's P.O.V_

Jaime Lannister was ten and six when he stood there, in the hallowed halls of the Red Keep, and watched Lord Rickard and Brandon Stark burn alive in wildfire. The youngest she-wolf was missing, abducted by the Prince most suspected, and Brandon, in all his northern delicacy, had stormed the Red Keep with a merry band of reckless followers, bellowing for Rhaegar to 'come out and die'.

He was arrested by the King swiftly.

He was charged with plotting Rhaegar's murder.

Their fathers, remarkably Rickard Stark, who Jaime thought, as Lord Paramount of the North, would know better, were called upon to resolve the charges of their foolish sons. More unwisely, they had answered, and came riding up to the Red Keep in such little numbers.

There was no trial. No hearing. The fathers had no time to plea for their sons lives. Brandon, haggard from being kept in the Black Cells, was brandished in a smothering contraption from Tyrosh, a longsword left just out of reach. His father was tied to a stake before the Iron Throne, in front of his gaunt, bleeding, choking son, and lit like a candle in the sickening green flames of wildfire.

The poor boy, only twenty old, strangled himself while trying frantically to reach the sword to free himself and his father. The father boiled and bubbled to death in his own armour watching his sons face turn blue.

And Jaime stood there.

Jaime watched.

Jaime did nothing.

No one did. No one moved. No one spoke. All the Lords and Ladies of Westeros, assembled, mute in the face of cruelty. All there was was the appalling, deafening, demented laughter of the King reverberating off the walls as the screaming of Rickard fell to silence, and the gasping of Brandon spluttered off.

Laughter and the sound of sizzling fire.

Jaime did nothing.

Jaime watched.

Jaime stood there.

Twelve moon turns in King's Landing had taught him one thing. Only one. How to go away inside. It was easy. Easier than watching a man burn to death to the cries of his dying son. He thought of Casterly Rock and the gilded glow of the castle in the Western sun. He thought of Cersei and her sharp smile and hot, slick hands. He thought of the summer fruit and the spiced Arbor wine his father liked to feast upon. He thought of the azure seas he swam in as a child. He thought of Tyrion's joyful snickering when Jaime would pull faces at the small child. He thought of home and suddenly, he couldn't smell charred flesh, couldn't hear screaming horrifically mingling with crazed laughter. Suddenly, he was home.

Safe and warm, where the songs he sang as a child were true, and the world was good and just and right.

A world where the King was not a rabid dog, and a six and ten boy was not forced to watch a father and son be slain on the whims and impulses of callousness.

Jaime didn't know why he glanced to the dais, to the Iron Throne, or when exactly Queen Rhaella's lilac gaze met his emerald from across the sprawling chamber, but it did, and he saw there, in the shade, the haze of pin-pricked pupil, something kindred. He wondered what she thought of when she went away inside. He pondered, through the bruises blackening her face in shades of blue, dusk and mauve, where she went.

He hoped it was somewhere as safe and warm as his own.

Haloed in the flickering green fire, she was lovely in a devastated way. The same way that dawn is beautiful when it breaks.

Jaime Lannister was the first out of the hall when the King dismissed them.

Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Gerold Hightower, found him in the kitchens that night, away from his post at Viserys door, drowning himself in piss-water ale. He snatched the cup from his hand, dragged him up by the scruff of his gold cloak, and shook him violently.

"You swore a vow to guard the King, not to judge him."

Aye. Jaime did. However, he never swore to not judge those other Kingsguards who had stood and watched as he had. He never swore not to judge those haughty Lords and Ladies as they watched one of their own slaughtered for pleasure, and did nothing.

He never swore not to loath himself for his own silence.

And he did.

He _did_.

* * *

_Rhaella Targaryen's P.O.V_

The winding road to the crown was paved in death. No one ever revealed that in the great songs. To become a King, a King must die.

Her firstborn son, Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, was birthed on the bonny banks of Summerhall as the castle, and their family, scorched away inside. She had watched it from the shrubbery, bent and twisted in labour pains, feverish, as the fire consumed it all.

Her sons first cry had joined the chorus of those perishing.

Princess Rhaella lost her grandfather, King Aegon V, in that misfortune. Her uncle, Duncan the Small, Prince of Dragonflies, who had given up his own throne for love, who Rhaella had adored more than anyone else in her family, also perished in the calamity.

As the song went, Jenny danced with her ghosts, and her dear, departed, dead husband in the hall of Kings.

Jaehaerys II, Rhaella's father, became King. His reign was not for long. A genial and witty, yet sickly man, her father died at only seven and thirty. And so, her husband, Aerys II, became King.

King upon the scorched bones of their ancestors.

On the wings of tragedy and fire.

In the wailing ghost and gloom of Summerhall.

Was it really so surprising what came to be from this crooked union, with such wanton death and destruction as its footing? Rhaella was Queen now. Wife. Mother. She had everything she had ever desired or dreamed of as a child, and it was all so very, very wrong.

* * *

_Jaime Lannister's P.O.V_

The Battle of the Bells sealed their fate. With a dashing conquest, Robert Baratheon had shown himself to be a genuine threat to Targaryen rule. A threat Aerys's spiralling ego could not stand to have breathing for a moment longer.

The King could not stand many breathing these dim days.

Jaime Lannister was kept close to the King. Close and dissected. Every word he said, every glance he gave, every wayward smile was picked and plucked apart for treason that could, the King possibly wished, lead back to Tywin, his once dear friend.

Jaime would let no such thing happen.

He knew how to play his part well now.

Yet, as Jaime was watched, he watched and listened in return. He watched as the King's paranoia festered like an open wound, puss and bile corrupting any and all attempts to avert what was sure to come. He watched as the King ordered pyromancers to his side, as they clustered and muttered and schemed. He watched as caches of wildfire were carted into the Red Keep in casks, disguised as shipments of Arbor gold. He watched them be stashed away to the far-flung corners of King's Landing.

Jaime Lannister watched as the King plotted to burn the entire city down right to the ground rather than lose it to a rapidly encroaching Robert Baratheon. He was not the only one to see the cataclysm to come. He had been not the only one to act.

Jaime was merely the only one remembered.

Lord Qarlton Chelsted, newly appointed Hand of the King, elevated after the exile of the previous Hand, Lord Jon Connington, following the loss at the Battle of the Bells, confronted Aerys upon discovering the ploy.

Qarlton begged. He pleaded. He cried on hand and knee. Jaime would forever remember the tears in his hazel eyes. Fat things, they were. Fat and true.

Aerys was deaf to it all.

Upon failing to persuade Aerys to halt the wildfire, Qarlton resigned from his office. Taking a shaky stand from his bow, he ripped the pin right off his doublet breast, and tossed it at Aerys's feet. He was a braver man than many, Qarlton Chelsted. Braver and dead.

Aerys had him burned alive that evening.

That was the first time Jaime Lannister ever thought of killing the King. As he stood there, vigil once more, still again, silent anew, watching another foolish brave man die, hand slipping to the jewelled pommel of his sword strapped to his hip, and thought, just thought, with one good thrust, the madness would end. Qarlton turned to ash and bone and Jaime's sword waited within its sheath.

_That_ day.

* * *

_Rhaella Targaryen's P.O.V_

Death followed Queen Rhaella wherever she went. Death and sorrow and misery. It clung to her like a well-worn cloak, comfortable but cold in its threadbare glide. Later, after Rhaegar's birth, as troubling as it had been, Rhaella was quick to fall pregnant again.

She was quicker in losing the child too.

That first miscarriage was hard. Harsh and vicious and cruel. The subsequent ones were no less harder, but the pain grew more… Familiar. She almost began to expect it each time she missed her moons blood. More grief. More anguish. More cost.

Some lived a day. Some lived a moon turn. Some never truly lived at all. One boy, one special, bright, lively boy, who Rhaella was sure, so sure, looked like cherished uncle Duncan, graced Rhaella's life for twelve moon turns before the Stranger stole him from her in his cot one thundering night.

No one could ever fully understand the pain of losing a child.

No one.

Yet, they kept trying. Another. Another. Another. Gone. Gone. Gone. Aerys was kind in those early years of their marriage. Kind and thoughtful and caring. He held her in her bloodstained bed, as she struggled and fought to get to the silent Sister carrying another lifeless bundle from the chamber, as she spat and cursed the Maester. He braided her silver hair from her sweat streaked skin. He would hum songs to her at night, through their shared tears, as he rocked them to sleep.

They kept trying, and another was lost, another gone, another stolen before their time, and Aerys, her kind, thoughtful, caring husband wasn't so kind, nor so thoughtful, or caring any longer.

Suspicion was like a rose bush, it grew slowly, so slowly, and it strangled every other flower near it.

He would have fits of temper, intense, furious, raging. He would accuse her, Rhaella, the only one who had ever truly stood at his side, who hurt as much as he did as another crypt was filled, of being unfaithful.

Bastards, he called them.

Their children.

Their dead children.

Bastards.

That was the first time Rhaella had ever hated her brother. Despised him. Wished him dead. He confined her to Maegor's Holdfast in the end, when his temper began to break more often than not. He compelled two Septa's to sleep in her bed every night, ensuring her fidelity, and stationed a Kingsguard outside her door.

Rhaella bore it as best as she could, in the only way she knew how. With dignity. She still had one son, one son who needed her, her Rhaegar. So she took the blows. She took Aerys's rage, took it deep inside her, to her very core, and locked it away. She took the slurs and insults, and she held her head high.

Ten and seven turns after the birth of her Rhaegar, her precious Viserys came, hale and hearty, and, for a brief moment of time, Rhaella thought all would be well.

Then Jaime Lannister was posted outside her door.

* * *

_Jaime Lannister's P.O.V_

Fire and death aroused the King. Quickened his blood in the vilest way. The day he burned Chelsted, he visited the chambers of his wife. Jaime was left to guard the door with a Ser Jonothor Darry, a task he would later be primarily answerable for. He listened to her cries and moans as the King raped her.

He snapped.

Jaime reached for the gold door handle, another hand halted his own, caught him tightly by the wrist.

"We are sworn to protect the Queen as well."

Jonothor looked to him with regret and pity. Jaime didn't need his pity, nor his regret. The Queen did.

Mother help them all.

"But not from him, lad."

No more was said. No more was done. The King left the chamber not a few hours later. Jonothor followed him, though Jaime was dismissed to stay and guard Rhaella's door. He heard her sniffling through the wood. Quiet. Alone. The Septa's customarily watching the Queen had been sent to assist the pyromancers.

There was nothing he could do.

Yet, something he did. A song sang. Sluggish. Mumbled. Growing. An old ode from Casterly Rock about knights and Princess's and lost land regained. Of love won and evil slain. He sang. Only sang.

Silence fell and Jaime was doubtful whether she had heard him or not. What did it matter, in the end? Perhaps it was for the best she had not. Then her voice, gentle, kind, as lofty and delicate as spun Dornish glass, came rumbling out from the darkness behind the heavy door.

"Sing me another, please, sweet bard."

And he did.

And another.

And another.

Well into the night, as Jaime's voice grew hoarse, as the stars and moon danced across the black sky, Rhaella's door cracked open.

"Come."

* * *

_Rhaella Targaryen's P.O.V_

Their coupling was fast. Desperate. Clothed. There was no love there, floating between them, squeezing the space rigidly with thumping heart, heaving chests, sweaty skin or smooth grasping hands. There was no breathy sweet nothings hissed in the dark. No oaths or pledges of passion given in reckless abandonment of senses and reason.

Yet, it was so much more to Rhaella.

It was her choice.

_Hers. _

She had twenty on the ten and seven of the Lannister Lion. His mother had once been her friend. Her close, dear friend. His father had been equally close to her husband… Her husband… If Aerys ever discovered-

Languidly, she noticed she did not care.

Just this once, it was _her_ choice.

She would always love, in some contorted form, Jaime Lannister for giving her just one moment in her life where it was her preference to make. And it felt good. So good. No pain. No blood. No wounded screams.

Her _choice_.

One last good knight in a capital of cowards and vagabonds, and for a turn, he had been hers to hold as Bonifer never had been.

No.

It was not love.

Nothing so common.

It was kinship.

Two people struggling to find a tick of peace, pleasure and possibility of songs in miserable times.

And when he left, in a flap of his gold cloak and one last smile, to stand once more vigil at her door, he left her with a budding treasure.

_Hers_.

_Only_ hers.

* * *

_Jaime Lannister's P.O.V_

Prince Rhaegar was dead. Slain at the Trident by Robert Baratheon himself. Jaime's father was at the gate, twelve thousand men strong, requesting entrance, as the new Lord Eddard Stark road with his own army, who would join with Usurper Baratheon's on the King's road. They were surrounded.

Lord Varys, the master of whisperers, implored Aerys against opening the gates, but Grand Maester Pycelle proved to be more convincing.

The gates were opened before the twelfth bell of mourning the Princes death from the Sept of Baelor rang out about the capital.

The Sacking began before the fourteenth.

The Queen and a young Prince Viserys, led by the master-at-arms, Ser Willem Darry, by decree of the King, had been evacuated to Dragonstone a moon earlier, when Rhaegar first road to the Trident. Poor Elia, Rhaenys and Aegon were in so such luck. The small family, now lacking a husband and father, had been sealed away in the Red Keep as Aerys sort to keep Dorne at heel with hostages.

News came flittering back on the wings of a raven that the Queen was pregnant again.

Jaime did not know what to think or feel of that.

He supposed he did not have the time, nor means, to think or feel much of anything other than the ruin arriving at his feet. Rhaegar, in all his folly, had taken most of the Kingsguard with him to battle at the Trident. Jaime Lannister, ten and seven, was left the sole defender.

He never stood a chance.

He could not hold the Red Keep, with the Targaryen armies spread so thin across Westeros, and thought of allies so slow to act, with the measly thousand men he had at hand. Yet, it was _his_ father at the gate.

The messenger he sent to the King, begging for Jaime's leave to make terms with Tywin, came back with one order. One.

_Bring me his head_.

Still, the messenger let slip something more. Rossart, the chief pyromancer, was with the King.

That could mean only one thing.

* * *

_Rhaella's P.O.V_

Death, once more, gripped to her with bony, unrelenting hands. Her Rhaegar was dead. Her grandson, Aegon, was dead. Her granddaughter, who had made her smile so, was dead. Her husband, Aerys, was dead. Her family, gone. A stag Usurper sat on their dragon throne, too close for comfort, and sometimes, every so often, Rhaella wondered if she were to look upon those hands, those hands that had cleaved her sons chest in, to his fingers, if she could see Rhaenys's or Aegon's blood crusting underneath nail too, or just her sons.

She dreamt she could.

Hope, however, was not entirely lost. Her son, Viserys, was with her. Alive. Well. Strong. Young. And there, beneath her dress, her stomach swelled. The Targaryen name would survive. She knew it. It had to.

It could not end like this.

Not for _her_ children.

She crowned Viserys King on the great steps of Dragonstone, with her own circlet, between the crashing waves and stony cliff, the only crown they had at hand. It sat askew on his tiny head. Slipping through soft white curls. Too heavy for the head.

As all crowns were.

The Great Houses of Westeros did not send aid. The people Rhaella had dined with, danced with, played with as a child, turned their backs to her. They did not recognize her son. Instead, they bleated and bowed to the Usurper. Robert Baratheon, first of his name, they called him. King.

Only for a while, she swore.

* * *

_Jaime Lannister's P.O.V_

When the King, resting before the Iron Throne, spotted the blood dripping off Jaime's unsheathed sword, he seemed delighted.

"Is that Tywin's life weeping from your blade I see?"

Jaime had found Rossart, veiled as a common soldier, hurrying to a postern gate, lit torch in hand. One good thrust, and the torch had gone clattering to the floor.

"No, your Grace. It is Rossart's."

Delight drained to dread. When Jaime gazed upon the King then, that waned and withered spectre of a man, jagged and filthy and soiled, as fright ignited behind his pale, watery violet eyes, he had no mercy. No fury. No revulsion.

It was as it was.

Numb.

The King rushed for his throne, scuttled and scuppered and stymied on the marble, and Jaime, steady, marched towards him, sword at his side.

One good thrust.

"Burn them! Burn them!"

No pyromancers would hear his plea, as the King had not heard the pleas of those around him. Rickard. Brandon. Chelsted. His own wife.

Jaime had slaughtered the pyromancers before he had entered the throne room.

One good thrust.

"Burn them all!"

The sword sliced through his back. Slick. Sleek. _One good thrust_. In the splutter of Aerys's dying breath, in the sound of his blood splattering on the steps of the Iron throne, tinkling like rain on glass, Jaime, for the first time since he was a child who loved songs so, thought he heard honour once more in the sound of his sword cutting through defiled flesh as he drew his blade free.

Honour and valour.

Aerys's motionless carcass fell to his feet with a thud.

* * *

_Rhaella Targaryen's P.O.V_

Seven moons after sailing from King's Landing to Dragonstone, Rhaella gave birth in the most terrible summer storm she had ever lived through. A wild song of nature. Rain that hammered stone, lightning crackling in the air, and winds that howled through the castle battered above her head, drowning out her own pained cries of labour.

It was the toughest birthing bed she had ever been through. Lengthy and drawn-out, and ever so harrowing, the old Maester of Dragonstone was alone, apart from Viserys hovering by the bed, confused and scared for his screaming mother, in his pursuit to see to the Queen and her unborn child.

_Children._

_Twins._

Daeron Targaryen was born first, a robust baby boy of lavender and silver and flushed, round cheeks. There was a moment of peace after his birth, a flash where Rhaella embraced her new son at her breast, and kissed his bloodstained forehead, and wept at his plump, merry face, right before the aches and agonies of birthing began anew.

A surprise.

Haraella Targaryen was birthed not much later. A girl. A little girl. Contrasting her brother, she was born with a headfull of roaring curls, farther white than silver, as her older brother Viserys donned. She was tiny, Rhaella remembered as she bled out.

Tiny. Slender. Delicate.

As the Maester cut her cord and rested her upon Rhaella's trembling chest, alongside her twin, who snuggled and nestled into her side, almost rolling over the smaller babe completely, as they must have been in the womb, as the babe blinked open and Rhaella saw those eyes peek up at her through pale lash, she smiled down at those green, green eyes as the storm thundered around them.

Those impossible Lannister green eyes.

An impossible Princess.

_Her _impossible Princess.

She was weak, so very weak, by the time Viserys slunk onto the bed beside her and his siblings, burrowing into her side, arm thrown over the two babes and his mother's waist, as she hummed and old song from her own youth to the slumbering children. The Maester dashed about her, dabbing her with oils and herbs, lighting salted incense, frantic and distressed, though she paid him no mind.

She had her children.

_Her_ children.

The fever set in by dawn.

Rhaella Targaryen was dead by nightfall.

She died as she had lived.

A loving mother.

* * *

_No One's P.O.V_

In 284 AC, in a violent storm that witnessed the birth of two Targaryens, a storm that destroyed what little was left of the Targaryen fleet, Queen Rhaella died, and chaos broke free. Stannis Baratheon, on the orders of his brother, set sail with his own forces to smash what dragon resistance remained. The Targaryen garrison of Dragonstone, upon hearing such news, prepared to turn Viserys and his siblings, Daeron and Haraella, over to him for safe passage.

If not for Ser Willem Darry and five loyal servants.

Under the cloak of night, Darry and his men smuggled the children to the last Targaryen ship docked in their port, through the Dragonglass caves curving beneath the cliff. The plan did not succeed without cost. Viserys and Daeron, carried by Willem himself, made it to the ship, Haraella, however, did not. The maiden, a favored Lady-in-waiting to the Queen, who had been secreting the Princess away, was cornered by a drunken soldier before she could reach the caves and was forced to try and find a different route to the dock.

They waited in port for as long as they could before Ser Willem Darry had to cut sail if he wished to protect Viserys and Daeron from the same fate.

No one saw Arabella of House Fig again, nor the Targaryen Princess.

Yet, no bodies were discovered washed up on shore, and no Baratheon celebration painted King's Landing in merriment, and so, Willem was left to hope the child and maid had made it safely out. Perhaps they, too, had found their way to the Braavosian coast as he and his charges had.

Perhaps one day he would see them again.

Perhaps not.

These were not the times for a Targaryen to be alone in the world.

* * *

**A.N: **Superfecundation is the fertilization of two or more ova from the same cycle by sperm from separate acts of sexual intercourse, which can lead to twin babies from two separate biological fathers. So, yes, very rarely, twins can have different fathers. I know, it surprised me when I first read about it lol. You learn something knew everyday.

I also wanted to quickly say this fic should not be taken too seriously. I've had a few angry reviews already, of course, as normal, on guest lol, and, really, all I wanted to answer was this is just a bit of fun. Why did I turn Daenerys male? Simply because I wanted to lol. If a normal Harry/Daenerys fic is your cup of tea, or a femslash Fem!Harry/Daenerys, there are lovely ones already written, better than I could ever hope to write, and I would point you kindly in their direction. Trust me, there are some beautiful masterpieces out there.

As for all those others who reviewed, _thank you so much_ for your kind words. It really lifted my spirits after having such a long break to come back and hear kindness. I really, truly, hope you enjoyed this chapter. I had so much fun writing it, especially Aerys's death because, well, it's bloody Aerys, and I hope, even if it's just one line, you found something that made you smile. Until next time, stay beautiful! ~_AlwaysEatTheRude21_


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Two:**

**The Lovely Lemon Tree.**

* * *

_Arabella Fig's P.O.V_

Running.

Breath steaming in the air like rain clouds on a spring morn.

The echo of a babe's forlorn cries.

They were so close to freedom. So close Arabella of House Fig, a lesser family hailing from the verdant Reach, could taste it on the tip of her tongue. The sweetest fruit she had ever bitten.

The sweetest fruit she would _never _bite.

It was not meant to be.

The Crone had slashed her yarns, threaded her needle, and their fate was ruthlessly settled like a card game was in an unsavoury tavern.

By treachery.

Dragonstone was overrun with defecting soldiers, baiting for blood. _Targaryen blood. _The moorings were cut off, blockaded, men laying in wait for a poor Lady of the Reach and a babe not yet cut her first tooth. As if they, in any form, could be a threat worth such reprisal.

There had been only one way out.

The Dragonglass hollows.

A hidden trail, from the kitchens to the quays, once used by fervent Targaryen Princes to meet secret lovers away from the eyes of their fathers.

A path Arabella only knew because she too, once, used it to meet her betrothed out from the prying eyes of her fellow Ladies.

It was their only hope.

A treacherous hope.

The caves beneath Dragonstone were a warren of jagged veers, winding bends, keen crags and snaking dips. In a frenzied flee for freedom, with turncoat soldier's nipping at her heel, and the hefty burden of a babe pressed to her quaking chest, the blackened reflections from the encircling dragonglass made it nearly impossible to tell path from dead-end.

She took one wrong turn too many, and the wrong sort of company arrived.

After all, she was not the only one to know of this path.

Her betrothed had known it too.

The betrayal was a thorny rose to hold.

They, these soldiers of traitorous heart, accosted them in the very core of the gleaming cavern, looking all their worth like a pack of rabid, sea salt crusted dogs howling for a bone to devour, right beside the glass arch, a beautiful edifice of serrated dragon glass and rippling shadows, lofty and striking and, in a certain light, Arabella thought, a little magical.

Ser Gilbar Estren, once a proud and loyal Targaryen knight, seized the lead in his motley band of duplicitous guardsmen. He broke away, took a step closer, edging, creeping. Arabella held the babe tighter to her chest, backed away until the knight stopped advancing.

_Closer and closer to the glass arch. _

Perhaps he hoped a familiar face would shift her choice.

Perhaps he thought his betrothal to her, a thing she had been so delighted about before, had bragged and preened over like a strutting peacock, would stay her hand.

Perhaps, but not at all.

It only strengthened her resolve.

Oh, she was so foolish.

A foolish girl with foolish dreams and a fool's errand to see a Princess to safety.

"Hand over the runt, Lady Fig. I will see you home, safe, myself. The King does not want more innocent blood spilled. Just that… Thing you have clutched in your arms. Hand it over and this too, all this, will be done with. One slice of a blade, quick and kind, and you can go home. Is that not fair of our King?"

Fair?

This man dare speak to her of fairness?

She had learned of what had transpired for the little Prince and Princess, Aegon and Rhaenys, for Westeros was a wind made of whispers, sealed away in Maegor's Holdfast, friendless and abandoned. They were _Children. _

Just children…

Arabella knew what this Baratheon's fairness demanded in flesh, and she would not let it, any part of it, touch a single hair on this babe's bonny head.

Arabella couldn't.

She had promised the Queen, the greatest and gentlest Queen Arabella had the pleasure of serving, gave her word in solemn oath on a bed of blood and death.

She would protect the Princess, come what may.

_Our Word Is Our Pride. _

The adage of House Fig…

A motto Arabella would die for.

"_Your _King. He shall never be mine. Not in a hundred winters, and a hundred more to come. So show us due respect, Knight. This is neither runt nor thing, Ser. This is Princess Haraella Targaryen, daughter of Queen Rhaella and King Aerys. You would do well to remember such, as you quite clearly need to be reminded of the vows you solemnly took."

He took another step forward.

She took a further stride back.

A dangerous dance of life and death.

"And you would do well to remember, my Lady, that there is no dragon King or Queen anymore. By this night's end, there will never be another one. Hand the child over. This is the last time I shall ask so graciously."

One forward.

One back.

A breeze whistled at her back, an ungodly gust of chill, ruffling the skirts of her sodden dress.

She thought she heard a whisper-

A voice-

_Voices. _

Quiet, muttering, murmuring and mumbling. Perhaps the Stranger was calling her to rest. Perhaps this was to be her last day of many days well lived. Perhaps it was a spell, for this keep was old, as old as the Targaryens themselves, and once, so long ago, magic had swam in their veins.

However, if this was to be her death, entombed in a tangle of glass and darkness, she would do it proudly. She would die as a Fig, having tried to keep her word.

Her spine straightened.

Her shoulders squared.

She met Estren's hazel eye.

"_Never_. No matter your perils or your bluster, you will not see Targaryen blood soak into this sand today. Not while I still have breath in my chest. _I swear it. _Look at yourselves. Look and see true. What would the Queen think if she could see you now? The Queen who lifted every single one of you up from the muck of Flea bottom? Without our Queen, you would still be nothing but drunkards and vagabonds dying in gutters. You owe her your lives, and this is the payment you give? She is yet cold in her crypt, and you wish to see her children join her? A pack of scurrying rats trying to abandon ship in the slightest hint of a storm. Ready to butcher a babe so the Stag usurper might smile your way… Men. You are _not_ men. I am more a man than you will ever be."

His face contorted, flickering with rage and ruin. His hand slipped to his belt. The hum of a dagger unsheathing was scarcely louder than the pounding of Arabella's heart thrumming in her ears. Brave.

She was _brave._

She was terrified, yes, but, she thought, that was the only time one could be brave, in the face of such terror.

She stood strong and true and bold under the tortured face of the Stranger.

"The Queen is dead. So is the Mad King. The Targaryens are no more. Yet, I suppose you are correct. You will be more a _dead_ man than I will be, if that is your wish."

It all happened so fast. Too swift to see or comprehend.

Estren lunged.

Arabella scuttled back.

Haraella began to cry anew.

Arabella jerked.

A snag hidden by sand caught her foot.

She stumbled.

She fell.

Estren's dagger missed her by an inch.

She fell and fell and-

The whispers, the voices, high and shrieking and so loud it was all she could hear as-

She fell through the arch.

Something caught her.

A thousand hands pulling and tugging and yanking.

Through and back and up and away and-

A flash of blinding light.

A sudden thrust.

Falling once more.

Knees crashing to sand-

Not sand.

Floor.

Marbled floor.

Dizzy. So dizzy. The world whirling and rolling and-

Hands on her shoulders, gentle and soft.

A kind face staring down in amazement.

Old and wearied, with streaks of red in his greying hair and beard, so long it swept his own knees, and what strange caps, tall and pointy and-

"Well, Minister, I suppose that explains why the Veil has been playing up. It seems we have… Visitors. Hello dear, lemon drop?"

Haraella cooed in her arms.

Alive.

Safe.

Not for long.

She should have never trusted Albus Dumbledore.

* * *

_Daeron Targaryen's P.O.V_

Daeron Targaryen was a gentle child. Mild and mellow and a child who dreamed such pretty dreams. He would rather dash after a butterfly than pick up a stick and play at swords. They called him Daeron the Prince of Dragonstone. Viserys insisted upon it, you see.

"You are a Prince, Daeron. The Prince of Dragonstone. It is your duty to act as such. Now, brother, halt your tears and harden your heart. We have a long road to travel and no time for rest."

He was five. Only five. His brother had him slung over his back like a travelling pack, tight, a small sack of their meager belongings held in Viserys's free arms, the only things they could snatch before the servants had stolen it all, carted away from the nice house with the red door and the lovely lemon tree in the dead of the night.

Daeron could not stop the tears, they seemed not to obey his orders no matter how hard he tried, but he did manage to stop sniffling.

The kind man with a kind smile was dead. Ser Willem Darry, kind and thoughtful and caring and _dead_. He was an old man, sickly too, and Daeron, too young to understand, had watched him waste away until there had been nothing left but shapeless skin and bones.

No more pats on the head.

No more smiles.

No more red door and lemon trees.

Willem Darry died, and the vultures flew in.

"But we have to stay at the lodge with the red door and lemon tree! We have to, Viserys! I had a dream, and she comes here, and we play in the gardens and-"

They called Daeron the Prince of Dragonstone, yet, some servants whispered in shaded nooks, Daeron the Dreamer might have been more precise. At the delicate age of five, Daeron did not fully know what a 'Prince' was, what a 'Prince' was expected to do, or where this Dragonstone was, but he did know one thing.

Daeron dreamed and sometimes, only sometimes, those dreams come true.

He dreamt of Viserys with a red rose blossoming out his knee. The next day, he fell from his horse and scraped it.

He dreamt of shadows dragging Ser Willem Darry bellow a calm crimson sea, and soon, he was gone. Blood on the lungs, the Maester's said.

He dreamt of men with no faces, only antlers, hammering at his chamber window, the chamber he shared with his brother, who told him in such sweet words they could take him to see his mother and father. The Baratheon Sellswords, the first of many attempts, tried to break into their room to slay them that moon tides end.

Some meant nothing, just strange, strange dreams. A crown of blue roses, dropped in the snow, bloodstained, an icy hand reaching, stretching, spreading, the sound of a lone wolf howling in the void. A white lion cub, with slit reptilian eyes, abandoned on a hill, bleeding and battered, snakes hissing and lunging, gnawing at paws with too large claws, seeking a kill, but the cub puffed out immense waves of fire, its shadow a great dragon. A red haired man painting white marble azure, gilt veins like coiling snakes, glancing over his shoulder, panicked, so frightened of the mountain looming on the horizon, hiding, must paint the marble blue and-

Bizarre dreams for a bonny boy who dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed.

However, there was one dream, just one, little Daeron adored.

A dream he never forgot when the sun rose, as he did most others.

He dreamt of the red door and the lemon tree, and a little girl. He dreamt of another Targaryen, a girl, like him, silver haired and pale and too thin, eyes the colour of spun Braavosi glass, and they played in the sunshine, and laughed, and she climbed trees while he chased butterflies and-

"There is no house to return to. They took it from us, Daeron. They threw us to the rabble as if we were urchins pleading for scraps at their table, and not the Heirs of the Seven Kingdoms come to-"

A long, suffering sigh.

Viserys was overflowing with them lately. So filled he could not help but let them out, Daeron thought, or else his chest would burst.

"We had to leave, brother. We could not stay. Sometimes dreams are only dreams."

Daeron wiggled and kicked.

"They _are _real! And she's really good at climbing trees and we-…We…We…"

It was the first time in gentle Daeron's short life where anger, hot and heavy in his gut, scorched him. It clogged in his throat, a cinder of all the words he wanted to say, and he found he could not get a single one out for fear of the heat suddenly burning in his belly.

They were _real. _

He knew it as he knew the sun would rise tomorrow.

He knew it better than he knew how to be a Prince.

The girl with green eyes-

His _sister_.

He dreamt of his sister, his tiny, tiny sister, and they played beneath the lemon tree and she would smile at him, and he her, and everything was brighter when she was there, and there was no Stags, no rain, no fear, no blood on the lungs or stealing servants.

Just he, his sister, and the lovely lemon tree.

Yet, they were leaving. Abandoning the red door and the lemon tree, and what if that meant he would dream no more?

No!

Viserys shirked him off his back after a rather vicious kick to the ribs, placing him down on the sandy backwater road out of Braavos. Their sack fell too, kicking up a plume of stifling dust and dirt.

His hands came down upon Daeron's small shoulders.

Heavy with the burden of being the older son.

Viserys was angry. Daeron could tell by the keen twist of his lips, the sleek of his eye, and the flared nostrils. Nevertheless, no shouting came. No fury or slur. He glanced down to him, his brother who suddenly seemed so very tall, crouched, eye to eye, lilac to lavender, and he must have seen something, perhaps the tears mounting on his pale lashes and, for once in a long, long time, Viserys's face softened.

"If it is meant to be, it will be. But we cannot stay. Without Ser Darry, the Stag will grow bold."

Daeron blinked at him.

"The mean Stag?"

Viserys nodded, silver curls brushing his chin.

"Yes, the mean Stag. He will come as he came last time, only more so. So we must leave in haste."

"But how will she find us if we're not there to greet her? She is coming. I know she is. I can feel it, and we can all play beneath the lemon tree."

Silence came, and then Viserys smiled at him. Bright and true, and he finally looked as he were. A ten-and-two boy, and not a haggard man bent and crooked underneath the weight of a crown they had no coin for, no army to guard, or land to rule.

A crown with no throne, Daeron was taught, was no crown at all.

And their throne lay a league away, sitting a usurper.

"A dragon will always find their nest, and we _are_ dragons. Have faith, brother. Ser Darry told me Lady Fig was in custody of her protection when we fled Dragonstone. If there is one Lady who is fearsome, loyal and brave enough to see Haraella to safety, it is Lady Fig. In this I have no doubt, and neither should you. Haraella is well."

Viserys pulled away and plucked up their sack.

"However, if we stay here I do not believe I can say the same for us. We must move. Come."

Daeron trotted after his brother, a puppy loping, slinking his smaller hand through his. Viserys's grip was tense and bold. Perhaps he thought, as with their possessions and property, the servants would steal him away too. It took two strides of his own to keep up with Viserys's sloping gait, as the brothers kept to the shadows of the road.

"Are you sure she will find us? Even if we have no lemon tree?"

Viserys grinned down at him.

"As sure as I am that one day we will go home to take our rightful place. I promise you, Daeron. I will see us home, and I shall see Haraella with us too. We are dragons, and dragons survive through fire that would burn lesser men. This is only our forging, and it will hurt, and it is dark, and it is hard. But one day, we will go home, and there will be no fleeing, no hunger, no shame. We will want for nothing. I will be King, you will be Prince, Haraella will be safe, and all will be well in the world."

Daeron lit up.

"All that I want? Can I have a lemon tree?"

Viserys laughed at him, snickering like a sand snake slithering through the long grass, ruffling the curls of his head.

"I shall find and give you one as tall and grand as the Sept of Baelor, and you and Haraella can play underneath until your hearts content. For now… For now we keep on."

Daeron didn't know why he spoke next, or where the question came from, but it bubbled forth like a spilled goblet.

"What of lions? Do lions find their way home too?"

Viserys stopped mid stride. His face rolled dark, as dark as a night sky with no moon, his gaze ahead but not seeing, lost.

"Do not, ever, speak to me of lions, Daeron. They are foul creatures. Never trust them. They would quicker smother a man while he slumbered, and let his widow weep on his shoulder, than be true."

Hollow and barren and angry. Typically, when such a terrible temper struck his brother, which was becoming more often, Daeron would quieten and slink away.

But he didn't.

He thought of that hazy dream.

A white cub alone on a hill, being gobbled by snakes.

He thought of his favoured dream.

The lovely lemon tree and the lovely sister and lovely games.

The two bled together, mingled, mixed, blended, wine in water.

_One. _

Suddenly, the answer was important. So valuable to a young Daeron, he did what he never did. He demanded an answer as he tugged harshly on his brothers hand.

"But do they find their way home too? Do they? Do they? You must tell me."

Another long sigh.

"I imagine they do, yes. Pray to the Seven one never skulks into our den. You cannot trust a lion. Like cuckoos in a nest, they pretend to be a brother for only so long, all the while they steal away all you hold dear until you starve. Promise me, Daeron, no matter what, you will never trust a lion. Promise me, brother."

A cub wasn't really a lion, was it? Lions couldn't breathe fire. Nor did they have eyes the shade of inferno, pupil slit.

"I promise."

It was not _really_ a lie.

* * *

_Arabella Fig's P.O.V_

She had failed. Failed the Princess. Failed the Queen. Failed her House. This land she had arrived in, by will or wish or magic she was still unsure, so peculiar and unusual and bizarre, was beyond her grasp.

But then _he _came.

Albus Dumbledore.

He had seemed so kind. A good man. A good man, with a kind face, and so much power… who had a way with words. He promised them safety. He promised them hearth. He promised them a free life, far from the clutches of the Baratheon.

It had seemed perfect.

How could she say no?

It was all she could hope for. All she could ask for the safety of Haraella, her charge.

Empty hollow promises, Arabella now knew.

He said exactly what you wished to hear, exactly when you needed to hear it, exactly when you were weakest to decline or see the lure he was waving in your face. A fisherman he was, Arabella thought. A fisherman who trawled in your mind, perused your thoughts, and promised you safety from all that you feared, all the while smiling so kindly.

He made her swear, with that strange stick of his, his hand in hers, that she would not tell Haraella of her origin. She would not say a word about this Westeros to the girl. No one could know, he said, that they hailed from a different land. He said it would be dangerous.

Dangerous for herself _and _the Princess.

They would try and use her, he swore. Use her to get to Westeros, new land for new acquisitions. Use her for her royal blood, which had so many uses to a Wizard or a Witch, so many potions, many of them dark and grim and deadly. Use her for her families affinity with dragons, because though the great beasts lurked everywhere here, they could not control them as Arabella had let slip the once great Targaryens had mastered.

They would use Haraella until there was nothing left to use.

He had been right in a way.

Albus did use her, used her royal blood, her families affinity for dragons, to win his own war, and it was all Arabella's fault.

He made everything else seem so dangerous, deadly, that you overlooked that, perhaps, there, standing before you with such a jolly smile and merry robes, he was in truth the most dangerous thing of all.

A man who had a way with words.

A man who knew exactly what to say to invoke fear, and make himself appear the only answer to your problems.

A man who knew precisely what chess piece to move to get what he wanted.

Yet, Arabella had not saw that in the beginning. She had only saw a kind old man who offered security in a world not their own, a world he vowed was so full of dangers.

She had taken it, swore it, on the condition that should Haraella already know of Westeros herself, she could speak to the girl of her home, and had not known by his magic, that golden light, she would never be able to break it.

She never stood a chance.

He made it seem so simple.

Of course Haraella, a month after their first appearance in a place they called Ang-Land, could not stay with Arabella. The woman did not know their ways, did not know how they worked or acted, and, he promised, Haraella was like _them. _

She belonged here.

She had called to the Veil, and the Veil had whisked her here, to safety, in her time of need. She was powerful, Albus insisted, that _this_ alone was proof enough of Haraella's magic. Perhaps Arabella should have seen the first warning sign there, but she hadn't. She'd been too focused on looking over her shoulder for the menacing shadow of the Stag to see the snake in front of her.

It was only fair the child be given to parents who would understand her.

Parent who could teach her the strange, strange ways of magic.

They would love her, he promised.

Love and care and protect.

So…

Arabella gave her over, and it was the worst thing she had ever done.

Albus took Haraella, took her to that dank dark forest, and left her there. Albus said the Potter's, the family he had chosen to care for the Princess, would be more inclined to take the girl in if they thought they came across the babe by fate rather than intervention.

Wizards, he told, had a predilection towards destiny and prophecy.

They did. They found her and brought her right back to Albus, who swore he had never saw her before, but by the light of her hair and the cast of her eye, she could only be a Targaryen, a family destroyed by someone he called Grindlewald, a good family. A tragedy. The Potters soaked it in, took the child under their roof.

They could not see the lies the spider spun.

Arabella had argued, argued and begged until she was blue in the face, but he would not listen and she was powerless. She tried to speak to the Minister, to the heads of their magical school, to anybody who would listen, to tell them of what happened, what Albus was doing, but her tongue swelled and her throat closed, and the Stranger squeezed at her as soon as a word of the Veil or Haraella tumbled from her lips.

They didn't listen.

They looked to Albus for explanation.

Albus waved her off with the excuse of being a _squib, _as if that was enough to explain her stammering, flushed face as she fought, fought so hard, to get the words out that never came.

They bought it.

Just like that.

And Haraella was lost to her.

They thought of locking her up, in a place called Azkaban, this mad squib who raved, who, in her last effort to keep the Princess, broke into the Potters home and tried to steal the babe from her cradle.

She was a danger to the child, they stated.

A danger to the Potters, they declared.

Perhaps a follower of Voldemort, they accused.

A mad woman who needed to be thrown away.

Because, no matter the world you lived in, Arabella thought, a woman with an opinion in the eyes of men would always be seen as _mad. _

Albus quelled their fears with those perfectly, smooth, cloying words of his, and sealed Arabella's fate. Azkaban was no place for a Squib, he argued. Not one who simply thought she was doing the best to protect a young child from harm, no matter how _wrong _in her attempts she was or her how _wrong _who she blamed was.

An unbreakable oath, which Arabella would later learn was the very thing he put her under in the first place, would be enough to curtail her.

The Wizengamot agreed.

They made her swear again, in a sick twist of irony, to the very man she was trying to warn them about. Swear never to go near Haraella Targaryen, unless the girl came to her first. She would not speak, harass, or stalk the Potters. Worst of all, the killing blow, she was under Albus's care, she must do as he said, follow his guidance, and not stray from his side, all held together until either he or she were dead.

Arabella became a puppet.

Haraella was lost.

Lost by her own foolish folly of trusting a kind face.

Oh Rhaella, sweet, sweet, Rhaella… She was sorry… So sorry…

All Arabella of House Fig could do was watch the girl from afar.

Watch as she died and beg for forgiveness from ghosts that were sure to haunt her to her dying day.

* * *

_Daeron Targaryen's P.O.V_

They left Braavos in the galley of a big bellied ship, fed on the warm crusts of bread and butter skimmed from the casks of milk the ship was hauling, passage bought by peddling their mother's favourite ruby necklace.

Daeron had thought he saw his brother crying as the necklace left his hand, replaced by the so few gold coins.

He promised it was the sun in his gaze, nothing more.

That was the first time Viserys had lied to him.

For many years, the Targaryen brothers roamed the Free Cities. From Myr to Tyrosh, from Qohor to Lyse, back to Braavos and now to Volantis, Daeron roved and Daeron dreamed of the lemon tree and his sweet sister and the summer fun they had.

He was nine now. Nine and wiser to their plight. It was not safe, in these times, to be a dragon. They hid their hair under turbans or scraps of cloth they pilfered from market stalls. They concealed their purple gazes by stealing their eyes the ground as they walked, down and cast away.

It was never enough.

The Sellswords always found them in the end, Baratheon coin heavy in their pocket.

They always had to run.

Move.

Never stopping.

There was never another lemon tree but in Daeron's dreams.

It was better in the beginning, when the Targaryen plight was new and shiny. Magisters and Archons and Merchant Princes welcomed them into their homes, with feasts and fires and merry dancers who tumbled and pranced and made Daeron laugh. Viserys soaked it up, did the best he could, promised compensation in all the gold they could wish for when, and he sincerely meant _when,_ he reclaimed the Iron Throne.

For a while, the Targaryen brothers were treated like Kings.

_For a while. _

Interest, like a waxing moon, waned. These people of fickle profits bowed their gaze away, and the brothers were left to roam alone.

Alone. Starving. With only a dream.

* * *

_Arabella's P.O.V_

Haraella Targaryen was her brother's sister, and Arabella _wept. _

The Potters were dead, and she, a child, was left, once more, in the cold for her aunt and uncle to take in as if she was nothing more than a stray alley cat.

Dumbledore placed Arabella in a small cottage near their home in Surrey, told her to keep watch, and she did. She watched and wept, and wept and watched.

Haraella was too thin. Bruised. Jittery. _Scared_. Arabella watched over her sometimes, in her own home, when the Dursley's left her behind. She could not speak to the girl, not properly, not under the unbreakable oath as she was, but she watched her about the house.

She was always watching.

Haraella was a child quick to smile, as Rhaegar had once been. She adored lemon trees, always buzzing around the one in Arabella's garden like a harried bumblebee, playing with an imaginary friend she called Day. Quicker still to kindness, as Arabella viewed one day, from the window of her bed chamber, as the girl took a broken baby bird in gentle hands, who must have fallen from her garden tree, and tried to nurse it back to life.

Arabella was sure it was her magic which made her succeed.

The baby bird had been a magpie. When it took flight, it was a dove.

She sang when she thought no one was listening.

Soft lullabies that, surely, the Dursley's never gave her.

She dreamt too, and Arabella was sure, so sure, one day, as she napped under her lemon tree, she had heard the girl mutter Daeron…

Yet, that was hopeful thinking.

Hopeful thinking of a hopeless woman who knew the small child didn't have many things to be glad for in this terrible world.

And still, Arabella watched.

It only got worse the older Haraella got, when she went to that school and everything fell apart.

Like her brother before her, Arabella watched as another Targaryen won the loyalty of another brash redhead, as Rhaegar had once won Connington's heart.

She watched her become brave and fearless and bold, as her brother had.

Arabella watched the war come trundling towards them, powerless under magic, Haraella in the eye of the storm.

Oh, so much like her brother.

Rhaegar had fought valiantly.

Rhaegar had fought nobly.

Rhaegar had fought honourably.

And Rhaegar had _died. _

And all Arabella could do was watch as history, that cruel, callous wheel, turned once more and the cycle began again.

Haraella had fought valiantly.

Haraella had fought nobly.

Haraella had fought honourably.

And Haraella had _died. _

Only, unlike her brother, she had not stayed dead.

She died a girl and rose a Targaryen.

With all the fury and fire of a wrathful dragon, and utterly mad.

She burnt it all down.

The school. The armies. Voldemort. Albus, who had thought so sure he had her on a leash, perished in his castle of stone. As if anyone could ever hope to contain a Targaryen in rage.

She scorched it all on the back of a silver dragon no one knew she had.

Fourteen years old, and she razed it all right down to the ashen ground.

They hailed her a hero. They named her the saviour. The Girl Who Burned, they called her. Albus's death, a beacon to the light, was a trifle to pay in the shadow of the peace Haraella had brought, or so they stated. Perhaps they were as scared of burning in dragon fire if they were to directly insult the girl.

It mattered not.

Haraella fled the battlefield, nothing but ash and slag, on the wings of her dragon, and locked herself and her dragon away somewhere no one could find.

Arabella would know.

She had searched.

Albus was dead in the blaze.

She was free from the unbreakable vows.

After so many years… She was _free. _

This was Arabella's chance. She was free to find Haraella, take her home and-

And she was gone.

Missing.

The new Minister, Shacklebolt, when Arabella had visited to ask where the girl was, told her he had called Haraella in a week before, only five days since the Battle of Hogwarts they were calling it, offered her medals and titles and platitudes for her service, only for her to march away, never to look back.

No one had seen her since.

Not Ron.

Not Hermione.

No one.

She had vanished into the storm that had rolled over Scotland.

Arabella had left the Ministers office, but she did not head to her prison masquerading as a cottage. She went down, through the winding halls, down to the very bowels of the Ministry, to the one place where it all began.

Because Haraella was her brothers sister.

A mirror reflection.

When he was younger, Rhaegar had been a sullen and serious boy, who read obsessively to the point it was a common jest in court to find the Prince lost between the pages of a tome. Then, one day, he fled. Ran from the castle. Disappeared into flea bottom.

No one knew why he ran. All that was left behind was a book, dropped, drooping on the floor where he had been studying. However, three days later, the Prince returned home, hale and hearty, although a bit dirty, and, for the first time in his life, he picked up a sword and laid down his book.

He had hidden in the rafters of the great Sept of Baelor.

A place he always thought of as home.

Whatever Rhaegar saw in those texts, Arabella was sure Haraella had saw the same phantom in the smoke of her fire. Like her brother, she had bolted.

Fled from herself.

Fled of what she could do.

Fled from what she _had _done.

They said Rhaegar had been good at killing, and that one enjoyed what one was good at. Arabella would disagree. Rhaegar had loathed it. Haraella was as skilled as her brother, and as sure as the tide would turn, Arabella knew the girl, the girl who had cradled a baby bird and sang such sweet sad songs, despised it as much as he.

There, if Haraella was truly missing, was only one place she would be, if she was not dea-

There was only one place a fearful child would run, a child who thought they had lost themselves to their own fury and madness, a child who called to the Veil in her time of need and had it answer back.

The one place all scared children ran to.

_Home. _

And now, here, with Albus dead, Arabella was finally free to follow.

She stepped into the cavernous room.

The wind whispered with the sound of a thousand voices.

The chill rattled her to her bones.

The Veil loomed above her, ominous and dark.

As so many years before, she would either die this day, or keep her oath that she had failed so terribly at upholding so far.

* * *

_Daeron Targaryen's P.O.V_

Daeron was ten-and-four when a ghost found him picking over lemons. Viserys had just returned to his side, after haggling in the local brothel for a bed for the night, and the brothers were making short work of getting their fill of the three silver coins they had.

If they did not find steady coin soon, Daeron feared their mother's crown would be next to be bartered for survival.

There was hope to be found, however, Daeron thought. For, if one could not quibble and cheat their way to a full meal and a hay pillow to rest a weary head in a place like Volantis, one could not do so anywhere in the entire world.

The Volantis market, as it often was, was crowded that morn. A child, lost in the sea of swarming bodies, wailed for their mother. A man was feverishly searching for his missing hound. Fishermen lugged nets of wiggling fish onto bloodied booths to be gutted and descaled. The whores from the brothels prowled in corners, fluttering eyelashes and beckoning men and women to their sweet perfumed embrace. The din of bartering traders raised to a crescendo.

This _was_ Volantis.

Hands held against foreheads to shield from the blistering sun. The salty stench of sweat hanging hotly in the air. The footpaths flooded with titling stalls, barrels of nuts and dried fruit stacked as high as one could see, skewers of meat roasting over open fires, powdered spices resting in tarnished red and dusky yellow mounds, or bright green sacks as large as feed bags.

In all this fury and flurry and life, Daeron stumbled across the one stall selling lemons.

He picked one up, gave it a squeeze, and he saw the red door and lemon tree in his mind.

He had not dreamt of his sister in a long while.

Perhaps that was all it was.

Dreams of spring and warmth conjured by a lonely, frightened child.

Perhaps she was dead.

As his brother, Rhaegar, was. As his father was. As his mother. Skewered like the meat being sold, impaled by an antler.

Perhaps she had been dead all along.

"We do not have the coin for lemons, brother. Put it down."

Viserys whispered from his side. It was never a good thing to let the trader know one was low on coin. They took what little you had, otherwise.

They had learned that the hard way.

His hand stalled, thumbing the pale yellow flesh in soft strokes.

He shook it off.

Dreams were for children, and he was practically a man grown now. He sure felt like one, at the very least.

And still, he held the lemon tightly.

"I said put it down!"

Viserys barked. Daeron flinched, even if, by ten-and-four, he was already a head above his brother and a shoulder width wider. Viserys was lithe, tall but willowy, as their father had been, he proudly stated. Rhaegar had been tall too, Viserys had told him... Tall and big and the perfect target for Robert Baratheon's war hammer.

His brother had grown hard as time had passed. Hard and unyielding and, if Daeron was truthful, brutal. A man now. A man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and a meaner bite to prove it.

He was not lost though. Not yet. He had his spells of anger, certainly, and he scowled and sniped and snarked, but at night, in the cover of stars, when no one but his brother could see any weakness, he still let Daeron crawl into his bed, where, as he had done since Daeron was a child, he would tell him tales of Westeros, the Iron Throne, their family, and all that would be theirs one day.

The one day that never came.

Daeron delved a hand into his pouch and pulled a silver coin free, flicking it to the wrinkled, bearded man of the stall. He snatched it from the air, used his one good fang to nibble, felt the truth of silver on his tongue, and nodded.

Daeron took the lemon and walked away, Viserys close behind, hissing and spitting at a wasted coin.

It was not wasted, however.

Not to Daeron.

Perhaps he would cut it, place half upon his pillow, fall to slumber to the tangy scent, and once more, just once more was all he wanted, he would dream of red doors, lemon trees and his sister.

Just one more dream.

Daeron did not get a dream that day.

He got something much more.

Viserys calmed down by the time Daeron had talked their way to getting a fish for half the price they should have paid. He was, perhaps, even happy by the time Viserys had gained them a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese for no coin at all, but a moment of aiding the man search for his hound. They were traveling back to the brothel they were presently residing in, right in the slums of Volantis by the ports, when the hysterical shouts started.

"Dragon!"

"Dragon! Dragon! Run! Dragon!"

"Death from the sky! Run!"

"It's in the sky! Dragon!"

They halted as the people of the market fled in panic, fighting to stay together in the flood of pushing bodies. Running and rushing and hurling. There was a sudden wind, strong and blowing and boiling, and Daeron, in fear, in amazement, glanced up.

_Nothing._

Clear blue skies, the storm clouds of last night bleeding away on the horizon.

He glanced to his brother, confused.

He saw Viserys looking behind him, up, pale, wide lilac eyed, mouth ajar.

The wind picked up.

It knocked the turbans right off their heads.

There was a deafening roar behind him, loud and ferocious, a sound that could stop any mans heart.

Daeron span.

Daeron looked up, and up, and up, and up, and-

And Daeron's world shifted.

The Dragon's scales were as armour, gleaming silver in the hot sun, laced with ropes of gilt, broad wings stretched wide in the sky, sweeping down. It was not a beast born, but a beast carved, Daeron thought numbly. Perhaps hewn from mountains, so huge and great, abnormally graceful in the sky, pleased to slumber, until it had been chiselled free by an artist struck by madness. Its maw spiked and angular, a hundred jagged teeth shimmering-

There was a dragon in the sky.

There was a dragon in the sky, flying-

Flying right at them.

Viserys grappled for him, wrapped him close in an enfold, and dragged them both down hard to the ground, the wind from the winged beast almost beating them both over as it swept into the market.

Landing.

There was a dragon in Volantis and-

There was screaming. Yells of terror. Cries of mercy. All ran, fleeing, bolting, escaping, trampling over each other to get away from the dragon in the market.

It reared its large spined head back and roared.

Daeron peered over his brother's arm, peeked and saw it standing there, so large it nearly filled the market from tail to snout, standing tall, proud, huffing in great breaths, scenting the air, searching and-

A slit eye, amber like fire, settled on him.

The lemon he had forgotten he was holding fell from his limp hand.

Bouncing away unseen and elapsed.

The dragon bowed low, belly close to the ground, and hobbled closer, snuffling and sniffing.

It… Hobbled…

The great claws of its winged legs prowled, as fluid as water, as did its right back hind, shaking the ground with each tremendous step, but the left…

The left curled tightly, balled, refusing to touch the floor.

Viserys swore.

He tried to pull his brother away.

Daeron-

Daeron couldn't move.

Transfixed.

Like the tide was transfixed by the moon.

It came right before them, this beast of fire and death, its breath flapping their hair, hot and heavy, and-

The winding, thorny neck of the dragon slunk away, down to its flank, and then-

At Daeron's feet, with its great muzzle, it dropped something.

Nudged it closer.

It _whined. _

Pained.

Scared.

Again, it nudged what it had been carrying in its back leg closer.

Gentle.

Something rolled onto Daeron's huddled, bunched leg.

Daeron and Viserys, breathless, hearts pounding, glanced down as the dragon, anew, whine rumbling into an elongated hiss.

A girl.

There was a girl at their feet.

An unconscious girl, slack in rest, half her face blackened and charred, still smoking in places, blood steeping down her frail neck, soaking a strange shirt crimson and-

A girl with silver hair and-

Daeron could smell the lovely lemon tree, smell it so clearly it as _all_ he could smell, and heard laughter, lofty like a ringing bell, singing in his ear, as green eyes crinkled as she darted behind the trunk, a butterfly resting in her hair, catch me, catch me, catch me, catch me-

The dragon whined again, higher, frantic, and urged her forward with its snout. The body rolled, closer, right onto Daeron's crumpled legs, right into his lap.

Viserys arms fell from him, he learned over his shoulder, peered down, and whispered.

"Haraella?"

The girls eyes cracked open.

As green as wildfire.

* * *

**A.N: **So, we have a little glimpse into Arabella and Daeron. I know not all questions have been answered, and perhaps I've added more to the mounting pile after this chapter, but, well, that would be poor story telling if there were no more riddles left to figure out at only chapter three lol.

**Whose P.O.V do you wish to see next? **

* * *

All that said, thank you all so much for the follows, favourites and reviews! Every time I find another email in my inbox, I swear a smile lights up my face. Until next time, Stay Beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21


	4. Chapter 4

**CHAPTER THREE:**

**Cruel Gods For Crueller Men.**

* * *

_No One's P.O.V_

"You are sure of what you saw, girl?"

King's Landing had a thousand eyes and a thousand more ears. Secrets, they say, never stayed concealed for long in the capital, with the birds and the bees and the spiders listening from the underbrush. If you had the coin, you had the rumours too, and rumours, many people knew, could wreck a family as quickly as a sword through an Heir's heart could.

In a cesspit like King's Landing, these rumours could make or break an empire.

It was the former, crafting a dynasty that would last through the ages, that Tywin Lannister laboured for. With blood, and sweat, and tears, he hammered away until the Lannister name rose as high in the sky as the sun. Until it eclipsed the Targaryen's themselves, who boasted the heavens as their home.

For that was what remained, was it not?

Fathers perished and wives grew old, sons were murdered and daughters were married off, but the name… The name survived through war and ruin.

And the Lannister's _would _survive.

"Yes, me Lord. I may not be me best currently, but me eyes are as clear as ever, they are."

The girl before him was soiled and grubby, reeking of her own excrement and piss, having been held in the black cells of the Red Keep for the last moon cycle. Hungry too. It had only taken Tywin a loaf of bread to buy her voice. Nevertheless, it had taken the promise of safe passage to Essos to buy her tale.

As many other's currently decomposing down in the black cells, she had been captured off Dragonstone by Stannis Baratheon when he took the Targaryen Keep for his brother in Robert's Rebellion. As a hearth maid, she had not been important enough for Ser Darry to take with him, a mistake the man would not live long enough to regret, and yet,_ as_ a hearth maid, she had been privy to nearly all the goings on at Dragonstone during the last Targaryen flee.

Hardly any highborn saw the help, but the help saw _them. _

They watched.

They listened.

Tywin had only questioned the girl because he had wanted to see if she knew where the Targaryen's were headed, of which the girl knew little of. Robert Baratheon had been on the Iron Throne for a little less than the girl had been in the cells, and his rule was still precarious and fragile.

Cersei was now his wife, Queen to the Seven Kingdoms, but they had no children yet, and Tywin, who had fought for this day, to see his own blood sitting on the Iron Throne, to see the Targaryen's crushed under heel, could not let a Targaryen uprising, for still, a few families, the Dornish namely, wished for their return, destroy what so many had died for.

What he had _killed _for.

Nevertheless, instead of learning the Targaryen Princes and Princess's whereabouts, he had learned of something else.

Something _more. _

Something far more costly and precious than a stale crumb of bread and a ship.

"Tell me again."

The girl, sat prone before him on the cobbled stone of a locked away chamber to the Red Keep, huddled in on herself, the chains that bound her around the ankles and wrists clinking.

"He sang her lovely songs at her door to hush her tears. He sang such pretty ditties, he did, and the Queen must have thought so too. She let him into her chambers. No one watches the hearth maids. We go in and out of all rooms stocking the firewood to burn, keep the fires going through the cold nights, we do. Have special keys, you see. Unlock many doors. That's our duty. Go in, unseen, turn the fires, and leave. I saw him enter the room and I thought, well, the King, the old Mad one, would give me coin for it if I told him. But I had to be sure, me Lord. The Mad King would burn me otherwise. So I took the key, I opened the door."

Tywin's boots echoed on the flagstone as he prowled towards her back, fingers locked and folded, anticipating.

"And they were…"

He could hear the girl swallow, a raspy noise, quasi-choking.

"The Queen was… Very thankful for his songs."

Tywin scoffed.

"Do not be coy now, girl. Not when you've already openly admitted you were about to sell my son to the Mad King for a few measly crowns."

Her shoulder's shook underneath her rags, as if she were trying desperately to hold onto the sobs cresting in her chest. Tywin applauded her effort, but despised her display of emotion all the same.

_Weak. _

"They were on the bed, me Lord. Naked as the day they were born, him between the Queen's thighs. It wasn't… Soft. It seemed… Frantic. Desperate. Me mother worked in a whore house; you see. I know what _that _looks like. Grew up around it, I did. I hid in the alcove by her chamber's after he left."

Anew, Tywin picked up his pacing around the cowered form, prowling like the golden lion emblazoned on the gilt banner behind his desk.

"And?"

Another shake, another swallow, another tear skirting down a dirt smudged cheek.

"I said nothin'. The Queen… She was a sweet lady. Too sweet for that lecher of a husband. I couldn't… I wouldn't take what little happiness she found, so I kept me mouth shut. When she left King's Landing, the King sent me in her party."

Tywin tutted, the din ringing like the draw of a dagger from a sheath.

"The child?"

The nameless maid nodded, her stringy hair flapping about her frail shoulders.

"Aye, born second. Twins, the Queen had. We did not have the right folk for the birthing bed, so the Maester rigged what he could. He put me on water duty. I was to dab at the Queens forehead with soaked linen and keep her cool. I saw the babe up close."

Tywin stopped his pacing, pausing before the girl. She dared not look up, only down, right at her hands ringed in rusted blood from the bite of her iron shackles.

"What did the babe look like?"

He had asked her this a hundred times, and a hundred times she told the same story. That was the pit when it came to the truth. Unlike a lie, as much as you wished, or begged, or prayed to your deaf gods, it never changed.

"The first one was as the Targaryen's come. Pale, silver haired, lilac eyed. Like the Queen and King, but the second… The girl? She had the silver hair, but…"

Tywin bent down deep on his haunches, trying to get the girl to meet his eye. She wouldn't. Perhaps she was not as feeble as he first thought.

"But?"

Her fingers coiled into her palms like the legs of a dead spider, nipping into grimy palm, and finally, she met Tywin's unforgivable gaze.

"I worked, for a time, in your wife's household. Did you know that, me Lord? I worked in the kitchens. I _know _a Lannister when I see one. I _know _those eyes, I thought. Those babes eyes… They were Joanna Lannister staring back at me again. It's in the cut of her jaw, the slight tan of the flesh, her shape, more feline than marble like a Targaryen. She has Lannister blood. I swear on it, me Lord. Haraella Targaryen has Lannister blood. Your _son's _blood. The gods willed it, they must've."

For a while, too long to hold, too intense to quantify, the two stared at each other and, for the first time in many years, it was Tywin who broke first. Coming to a stand once more, he bared down on the girl crumpled at his feet.

Yet, even this could not change the truth.

"This babe, when the Targaryen vanguard turned after Rhaella's death, was she slain?"

The girl shook her head.

"No. Rhaella's favoured Lady in Waiting stole her from the cradle. Arabella of House Fig. They disappeared into the Dragonglass caves, got separated from the young princes. No one's seen the two since. Not all of us were so lucky… But, I told you all me Lord. _All._ Please, you promised. You said if I told you the truth, I could go free."

Tywin glanced over to the guard stationed at his door, lazily gesturing him over.

"And you can. Baldric, see the lady out."

The girl broke down into sobbing wails peppered with snot filled thanks. The Lannister knight at the door marched over, heaving the body of bones up from the ground, dragging her to the hall beyond, her gratitude only muffled as the heavy oak door slammed shut.

As soon as it did, Tywin turned and faced another man, a towering body of anger and devastation, guarding the corner of the room, half his face shattered in knotted flesh and gnarled burns.

Sandor Clegane.

"See to it the girl does not tell anyone else what she just told me."

The order was understood without it being explicitly spoken, as all good dogs do, and Sandor left to see the lady _free. _At last, Tywin turned to the final man in the room, swathed in grey, dithering by his desk.

"Is this possible, Pycelle? Could that babe be a…"

Tywin dared not say it. The thought was almost ungodly cruel. A sickening twist of fate. How hard had Tywin fought to convince Aerys to wed his Rhaegar to Cersei in hopes of a Targaryen-Lannister child? Too hard for too long, and all redundant in the end.

Just to spite him, Tywin, who had been Aerys's closest ally since childhood, he had chosen that Dornish girl for his precious son instead, and then proceeded to strip Tywin of his own heir by folding him into the Kingsguard. Practically ending Tywin's lineage.

The rest, as they said, was history.

Yet… After all this… After-

The Seven did so adore their cruel jokes.

In the end, Tywin didn't need to voice it. Pycelle hummed long and hard, a drawing noise of scrolls being unfurled.

"Possible? I have heard stories, my Lord, from other Maesters. They call it brothel born in the Citadel. It happens sometimes with the whores, who lay with more men in one night. Twins born from different fathers… Possible, yes, but very, very rare."

Tywin came to his desk, silent, wordless, deep in thought. There he sat, and there he plucked up his quill and parchment, and he wrote.

There he _planned._

"Do you wish for me to bring you Ser Jaime?"

Tywin's quill scratched away.

"No. Do not speak of this to him. Not one word, do you understand me? However, Pycelle?"

Tywin glanced up, green eyes fierce, and Pycelle shuffled beneath the heat of his glare.

"Find me that child."

Pycelle nodded, scuttling away.

* * *

_Haraella Targaryen's P.O.V_

There was one way, and one way only, to describe the pain she was in. _Drowning_. It was the kind of pain that grabbed at her, consumed and choked until she couldn't breathe, and she couldn't think, and she couldn't do much of anything but feel the agony blazing through her like a forest fire.

She _was_ on fire, Haraella thought at one point. Burnt alive by the kiss of lightening. The pain took consciousness from her in moments of mercy. It snatched and gave, like the ebb and flow of the sea. She preferred that, those sweet, sweet moments when she wasn't awake, when she was somewhere dark and thoughtless and far away from the_ burn_.

Yet, there were moments when Haraella _was_ conscious. Terrible moments when lucidity bled through that calming darkness and brought nothing but pain and confusion. There were voices around her, noise she could not untangle, but heard all the same, speaking words she did not understand.

"Lightning… Scarring… milk of the Poppy… The Stranger…"

They came and went, and came again. Voices and sounds, and flashes of light, as if she were passing through a chandelier. Haraella thought she begged at one point, begged until her throat was hoarse and her voice was lost, begging for it all to stop.

Just let her sleep.

Just let her rest.

She saw things too, flickers and bursts of fuzzy images, as if her dreams had spilled and, again, she was drowning. A glint of Vaenora's scales. A big black wall, so tall she could not see the sky. A gate lifting. A pale brow, as pale as her own, arching, sullen. The slope of a broad shoulder, bobbing with her movement, with the drift of the ache.

It was harder to feel things through the pain, but she sensed… Something. The barest of brushes of coarse cotton against her good cheek, as if she were being cradled against a large chest. The slip of sheets behind her, silk cloying at her roasted skin, as if she were being laid down. Hands pinning her down, as something cold and contrarily burning was tipped and dabbed at the side of her face, the side of her neck, her chest and waist and down her left leg.

She thrashed then.

Bucked and beat and bounced like a filly being broken in.

The hands only pressed down harder.

She cried until there was no more air left, until her lungs were shrivelled walnuts in her quaking chest, no more thought, just pain and burning and-

A hand in her own, fingers soft, deft, _gentle. _

There had been something gentle in her hand, so strange in this world of pain she suddenly found herself in, and Haraella latched onto it with a fierceness she did not know she had. She squeezed and pressed and yanked it close, her only tether to something… Something _kind_, so hard she thought she might have broken bone.

The hand squeezed back.

"You're safe now… You're safe."

Strangely, she wanted to laugh.

Maybe she did. It was hard to tell. Something came out of her throat, cry or chuckle, one side of the coin or another, a sound of passion both great and awful.

Perhaps it was a roar.

When had she ever been safe?

Not with the Dursley's. Not with Albus. Not with anyone, or any time, or anything. Safe was a word she did not know, a different language she could not translate, a thing Haraella Targaryen never got to have.

Yet, Haraella saw_ him_ then, and she thought, maybe, somehow, someway, she was dead all over again.

No, not dead.

_Dreaming. _

For Haraella Targaryen was a girl who dreamed strange dreams, of volcanoes exploding until skies bled red, of fields of sapphire roses smothered in sands, of snow and ice and fire clashing right beneath her skin, and death rising from blood soaked ground, and sometimes, rarely, she remembered.

An embrace. Safe. Warm. A silver storm with silver rain, and silver hair fluttering in her face. A lopsided smile, a twirl, whirling, spinning through her memory. A tower of salt and smoke and storm, a bloodstained bed, a dying woman's last smile, and the day a boy held her close.

Once upon a time, a brother had held Haraella Targaryen.

She was struck with a flash of clarity then, so vicious and severe it seized what little strength she had left. He looked older than what the small boy in her foggy memory did. His face thinner, sharper, _keener. _Yet, the eyes were the same, an lilac she had never, not truly, not _ever, _forgotten.

His grin was still lopsided, she thought dazedly.

Crooked and mismatched, and maybe everything Haraella had always wanted to see once more. Perfect in its flaws, because it was that, the imperfections, that made it all so terribly real.

"You're safe. You're home. I've got you."

Home.

Vaenora had brought her _home._

Haraella clawed at his hand as if she could steal it right from his own body, to take it into her own and never let it leave. A piece of home buried inside her, somewhere no one could steal it away from her again. She sobbed for the pain wrecking her, she wept for the joy of the lopsided smile, and moaned right until the darkness pulled her back down into that gentle nothingness.

* * *

_Viserys Targaryen's P.O.V_

Once, all believed in dragons. From Sothoryos, bending beyond the sun dry desert, across the rose's felled fields, through the wolf's wintry plain, to the Sunset sea, everyone believed in dragons when the world was crisp and sprightly.

Once, they had all believed in the Targaryens, and one day, on his life, Viserys swore the world would believe again.

Or burn in the Seven Hells for what they did to his family.

Viserys tried his best to teach his brother, Daeron, who was gentle and kind and too soft for this world, of their legacy. However, a world of dragons and bullion and Targaryen sovereignty was a world before his time, and Viserys, as much as he wished, could not describe exactly what _not_ being hungry felt like.

How do you explain_ not_ being hunting by the Baratheon's, when that was all Daeron knew?

How do you clarify a home, one place, one towering structure, to a boy forced to move from city, to town, to dock?

How do you describe safety to a child who never had it?

Viserys did not know, and perhaps, in a way, he failed his brother. However, Viserys would rather have failed in this than have his brother dead at the Usurpers feet. He would rather Daeron only know Viserys, the simmering streets of the free cities, the scorch of the Braavosi sun bearing down upon their necks, than to have him know the same fate as Aegon and Rhaenys.

Perhaps Viserys was cruel and callous. More so as the days dragged to weeks, and weeks bled to years, and still, nothing changed. Desperation, he thought, was madness in and of itself, and, by the Seven, Viserys _was _desperate. Desperate for more than a pillow house to rest their head, for food not stale or rotten, for shadows to be less threatening, and for the day he would not have to worry of assassins and coins and armies to reclaim their home.

The one place they could finally be safe.

Because that was how this ended, was it not? It had been near five and ten years, and still, the Stag King sent man after man, and it would not end until either the Usurper, or they, were dead.

Dead like his mother.

Dead like his father.

Dead like his brother.

Dead like his niece.

Dead like his nephew.

Dead like his sister…

Everyone Viserys had ever loved, loved more than he could ever say, the Stag had stolen from him one after the other, after the other, after the other. Each loss was a scar on his mind, a wound that wept, a nightmare not ended.

The Stag King had forced his mother to flee, to give birth to children in an unaired Keep, with no Silent Sisters or Septas to assist her through the labour she bled out in.

The Stag King had turned the Great Houses against his father, and murdered him on the steps of his own throne.

The Stag King had bashed his brother's chest in until he could not breathe and died alone in a riverbed of silt and rubies.

The Stag Kind had smiled at the man who brought the ruined flesh of his niece and nephew before them, wrapped in red cloaks, and rewarded the old Lion with coin and a seat on the Privy council of traitors.

The Stag King had hunted them, children, newborns, until his sister, his sweet sister who he had held and smiled and sang to as their mother laid dying behind him, was lost in the Dragon glass caves of Dragonstone, never to be seen again. Lost to the sea in the arms of Arabella of House Fig, where he could not follow and-

Yes, Viserys was cruel, cruel in a way he found hard to control, but only because the world he lived in was equally so.

It was constantly queried whether you believed in the gods, old and new, faceless and nameless, Lord of Light or Great Others.

By the end of this war, Viserys promised, the gods, every single one of them, would believe in _him. _

When the Dragon came tumbling out the sky in a plume of smoke and thunder, in the backwater Market of Volantis, laying bare the broken, bleeding body of a small girl-

A small Targaryen girl-

A small Targaryen girl that, impossibly, Viserys _knew_, knew as if it were his own reflection, knew as if this girl was his own limb, his own heartbeat, knew as she were-

She were his own_ sister_, at his feet, there was no questions of gods and justice, of death and survival, of assassins and coins and retribution, only hope, and the memory of the weight of a babe in his arms, blinking up at him with wildfire eyes.

For once, just once in his cruel, cruel life, for a cruel, cruel boy with the weight of a dynasty resting on his too slim shoulders, the gods smiled at Viserys between the lashes of a sister thought lost, now returned.

Returned and _dying._

* * *

_Viserys Targaryen P.O.V_

It all happened so very fast. One moment he had been arguing with Daeron, something that happened more lately than not, over lemons of all things, and the next, she was there.

Haraella was there, at his feet, all grown but achingly familiar in the way a tree could still remind one of the sprout they planted… With a dragon the size of a small Sept at her back.

A dragon, full of scale and might and winged fury, huffing and puffing at him and Daeron.

Viserys first instinct had been to run and hide. To get his brother away from the immediate danger of tooth and claw panting at them. Old tricks were hard to break, and to a man who had spent most of his life running, Viserys had fallen back, tried to yank his brother away, retreat from the better strength.

All until the great beast had unfurled a girl from its taloned foot.

A girl he knew.

_Haraella. _

There she was, right there, at their feet, after so many years… His sister, charred and moaning and falling back to unconsciousness.

Things after that abrupt recognition had transpired quickly, too quickly to properly remember. Daeron had haggled the singed girl into his arms, as the beast behind her whined, and before Viserys could think, he was leading the trio, dragon trailing, marching on the vast wall of the Black City, the streets emptied in fear and panic.

The Lords of the Black City took one glance at the silver dragon prowling, tail lashing, smoke bubbling up its throat and opened the gate. An action the would-be Valyrians behind the safe, dusky wall had denied Viserys of for months, despite all knowing he and his brother were, perhaps, the oldest Valyrians present in Volantis.

Just like that.

One glimpse at scale, and they… They _bowed. _

It was a curious sensation, intoxicating, one Viserys had long forgotten, to, for once, just once, be taken seriously. To not have to beg and plead for the littlest of scraps on hands and knee. To be… Respected. Admired.

To be a Targaryen.

The Lords and Magisters inside the Black City fell over themselves to do as Viserys and Daeron asked, from clean clothes to somewhere safe to rest, harried by the dragon watching them with amber eye. They bowed low, stooped and fawned with strained smiles and called him King…

Not beggar, or vagrant, but _King._

As they called Daeron Prince, and Haraella Princess, and suddenly… Suddenly they were Targaryens.

Or a family with a very,_ very_ big dragon.

Ultimately, too large for a building, the silver dragon took refuge outside, across the grand courtyard of the highest tower… Guarding the trio inside. Perhaps, as Viserys, despite the years, knew Haraella on sight, possibly the dragon knew a Targaryen, and had taken Haraella to them in desire of aid.

Most of all he remembered, from Market to tower, how desperate he had felt. As desperate as he had ever been. As desperate as he was that very morning, when he had sincerely considered selling their mother's crown for what little coin he could get from a smithy.

For the gods were cruel, cruel enough to give him his little sister back only to take her away if he didn't hold tight enough, and what would he do if she, or Daeron, were to be-

The gods were cruel, they had taken so much from him already, and he couldn't… He_ couldn't. _

The Maesters and Healers the Volantis nobles sent cleaned Haraella as best as they could, applied healing paste and herbs and funny smelling tonics, and promised his sister should awaken soon. She was not as burned as Viserys first assumed by her blackened skin. Seared? Yes, but not _burned_.

The difficulty, the Maesters told him, was in her body itself. Knotted tight by the lightning, muscle torn and frayed like tattered twine. She would be hurt, they said, hurt but _alive. _

Since the dragon had come sweeping out the sky, Viserys found he could breathe again, think again, _be_ again.

Standing at the edge of her mattress, a fine thing of feathers and velvet, Daeron dozing restlessly in the chair just across the way having refused to leave the chambers, Viserys reached out, fingers brushing ashy curl from sweat damp forehead, part swathed in ribbons of herbal laced linen.

The hair threaded through his fingers like silk, and his hand shook violently.

_Real. _

The hair was real, and the face was real, and it was all real and…

Maybe even the gods could take pity, once in a while.

He crumpled then, knees knocking wood, the strength from his legs swiftly gone, lost to a curl of hair twisting around his finger as he crashed down.

Perhaps he knew this to be Haraella because, for a flicker, a flash, when she had first bowled out from beneath a dragons wing, Viserys had thought, maddeningly, that there, right there, was his mother.

Honeyed Rhaella with her kind smiles and soft eyes and everything good in the world.

When she had died, stolen from him by the Stranger, by the Stag King, Viserys had truly believed his mother had taken all those good things with her into the long night. That he, the beggar boy, would never know such things again.

Yet, here Haraella was, and maybe he _could._

Perhaps they _all _could, and, if this were real, if he did not wake up alone, in the pillow house, hungry and scared and desperate as he always was, as he kept expecting he would, then perhaps the gods did not hate him so.

Please let them not hate him so.

Outside his command, for what could have been seconds or days later, Viserys began humming. An old tune, one he used to sing to Daeron when he was a child and the dark scared him so, one their Mother used to sing to him, when the storms raged outside the Red Keep and rattled the glass windows of his chambers.

"Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray. Stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day. Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray. Soothe the wrath and tame the fury-"

A croak from below.

"Teach us all a kinder way…"

Viserys glanced down, just in time to see Haraella blinking awake, voice hoarse and guttural. She groaned through the parting fog of sleep, rolling her neck, wincing as the bandages pulled taut, curl sliding through his finger's grasp as her face slid away.

Viserys felt oddly bereft.

"Where am I? Where-"

A new grumble, a precipitous fear. She hoisted herself up by her elbows, moaned, and fell back down, face fixed in pain but speckled with a dogged sense of grit.

"Vaenora…"

As if the dragon could hear its rider calling, a roar echoed from outside, deep below, and the noise ostensibly soothed the fear lurching across Haraella's scowling brow.

"The dragon is here. It is safe, waiting outside."

Haraella did not glance his way, not even as he spoke. She, instead, sagged into the bed sheets, limp and weak like a newborn kitten, mewling as her trembling hand came up to the linen slivers on her face, fingers skimming before they stiffened, intent on tearing the bandages off. Viserys's own hand came shooting out, fingers surprisingly soft as they fixed themselves around the thin wrist.

"I would not do that. The herbs are healing you. You need to keep them on until the muscles bind."

She met his eye then, a green almost unbearable, just as Viserys remembered, and it was a dark pain this moment, a dark pain of _want_. That was the type of man Viserys was. A man of want and wanting, and never having-

Only he did _have_ this time, did he not? She was right there, Haraella, the sister lost to the caves, before him, looking to him, looking _at_ him, and he felt… He felt _real, _for the first time since his mother died, Viserys felt real, as Haraella felt real, as it all was so excruciatingly, exquisitely _real._

This was not a dream.

He would not wake up, alone, sobbing.

It hurt, and it scorched something deep in his gut, and it felt fucking _good_.

Haraella, nonetheless, appeared startled to find someone at her side. She seemed ready to tear her wrist away from his grip, to bolt, to demand to know who he was, when, there, eye to eye, lilac clouds to wildfire fields, she stalled and frowned. Confused.

"I know you."

Caution fleeced to a sort of misty perception, and Viserys thought, possibly, she must have remembered_ something_ of his face, an angled cheek or a crooked grin, or the arch of a brow, because she did know, as he knew.

Knew in a way he should not be able to but does.

By the Seven, he _does._

Because dragons see dragons, despite the colours of their scales, or the skies that separate them, and no one else needed to believe, not Westeros or Essos, or Kings or Queens, only they.

Only _they. _

"I am Viserys Targaryen, and I am your-"

"Brother. You're… You're my brother and I… I remember. The dreams. I-… The boys under the lemon tree and the butterflies and… Viserys? Is that really you?"

It fell from her lips like a prayer, those dark devotions only whispered in the night, dangerously hopeful, dangerously dire. Viserys's eyes stung, he thought, as if they too burn and weep, and his throat was impossibly tight, so tight he did not think he could speak and yet, not once, not ever, did the smile perish on his face.

It merely grew, as hope is prone to do.

"It is me."

He did not know who moved first, as he did not know how he knew Haraella by one peek, or if he had failed his brother or not, or so many things, things that haunt him, things that make him cruel, and yet, here, none of it mattered.

For he was _here_, and Haraella was _here_, and Daeron was _here_, and his family was not gone, it was suddenly in his arms, stretching for him, grieved and injured, but alive.

The Targaryen's lived, not merely survived, they _lived. _

It was the sweetest moment in his life.

They folded into each other, huddled and clustered like petals pleating into sunlight, and the crown of her pale head was tucked beneath his chin, as his arms were tucked around her waist, and suddenly there was a winding bolt and latch, a rusted key finally fitting a broken lock, and it was all he could do, all he could say, to repeat himself.

It's me.

It's me.

It's me.

The gods did not see him, not in his strife, not in his loss, not when he prayed and prayed and prayed in the dead of the night. The Lords and nobles did not see him, only his uses and perils, his Targaryen name with his Targaryen face and his could-be Targaryen glory or ruin.

Yet, Haraella saw him.

Just Viserys.

And suddenly he was home.

"It's me. You're home. You're_ home"_

* * *

**A.N: **I do hope you all enjoyed this chapter, and it at least partially made up for the monstrous wait from last time. I really didn't mean to leave everyone hanging so long, but life, as it often does, got in the way. So, here it is at last, and I truly do hope it was worth the wait I forced on all you extraordinarily patient readers.

As always, who's P.O.V do you wish to see next?

If you have a spare moment, please drop a few words into the little box down there. They keep the muse from whining. Until next time! Stay Beautiful! ~_AlwaysEatTheRude21_


	5. Chapter 5

**Note: P.O.V/chapter segments are not in chronological order. Time has either passed or reversed between each one. This is important to remember, especially in this chapter, so it doesn't seem like characters are apparating around the place (no two day journey to Riverrun here D&D), and more than a fortnight has passed between start and finish.**

* * *

**CHAPTER FOUR:**

**Letters, Lies, and Little Lion Men**

* * *

_Tywin Lannister's P.O.V_

By the time Tywin Lannister made it to the chambers housing the Small Council, the Seven Hells had already cracked open. Principally, the first bitter taste of impending calamity came from the rotund presence of the King himself, Robert Baratheon, first of his name, within the meeting. Notoriously apathetic in matters of governance, Robert chiefly left his Small Council to the dull affairs of administration, favouring to spend his morns eating, drinking, hunting, and whoring his way into an early grave.

His attendance was not something Tywin took lightly.

By the solemn disarray of the other Council members, it was a wise choice indeed.

Hand to the King, Jon Arryn, Lord Paramount of the Vale, and Warden of the East, was by his charges side, pallid and quiet of voice, muttering away to an increasingly flushing Robert, certainly trying, _futilely_, to calm the raging bull with a gentle hand upon his once Ward's shoulder.

Pycelle, Grand Maester, Tywin's own well-bought man, nestled into himself by the table, furiously penning down a long, winding scroll with a goose feather, striving to make himself look as small as possible. Master of Coin and Master of Whisperers, Petyr Baelish and Varys respectively, were tongue-locked in a heated argument, heads bowed as if they were readying to butt at each other like goats on a farm.

Renly Baratheon, the King's own brother, the weakest of the three in truth, was, curiously, without grin that day, instead subdued, chalice empty of wine, staring out the slit window to the city beyond from where he stood resting on masonry. The Master of Ships, Stannis, was, not surprisingly, _not_ present, as he had taken to staying upon Dragonstone the last few moons since his heir, a daughter, had been struck down with Greyscale.

Tywin was grateful for small mercies.

Robert was every bit a Baratheon that morn, black of hair and bright blue eyed. He was a towering man, taller still from his thick soled boots. As a young man, he was considered handsome, Tywin knew, muscled like a maiden's fancy the soldiers used to say.

However, now, Robert had grown thick in a portly way, as round as he was tall, often red-faced from drinking with thumbed bruises beneath his once bright eyes. He walked as if he was half in his cups already, sweating through his silks, his beard, a wild and thick and fierce thing, obscuring the jiggle of his double chin.

Nevertheless, despite his ungraceful slide into fleshiness, the King was every crumb as daunting as he was on the battlefield, a veritable giant swinging his war hammer above his head. A leviathan that had, as soon as Lord Lannister came promenading into the Small Council, locked onto him like beast snuffling prey as if he were out in the King's Wood hunting.

The King stole himself away from the gentle words of Lord Arryn and the pacifying hand, and thundered over in great pounding steps, the Crown upon his brow tilting crookedly. Halting before Tywin, the brutish man of brutish pleasures snatched a meaty fist into the front of Tywin's tunic, wringing deep, heaving close.

"You swore to me they would be dealt with, Lannister! I should have known! That is all you are good for! Empty, gilt words!"

Tywin Lannister coldly answered.

"Release me."

The King stared, and snarled, but eventually his fingers disentangled themselves from the velvet of Tywin's tunic, and his great hand crashed to his side. _Good_. Perhaps the King had forgotten who it was exactly that had aided him in the perilous path to the Iron Throne, who exactly convinced the Mad King to throw open the gates of King's Landing for Baratheon's men to enter, but Tywin had not, and it would be best for all that Robert recalled all he owed to the Old Lion of the West.

A King could be as easily unmade as he was made.

Especially when that King had a son ready and waiting to inherit his throne.

A boy of Tywin's own blood.

Trudging back to the long table of the Small Council, Robert filched the flagon of arbor gold and downed the lot. Knowing he would find no true answers coming forth from the King, Tywin turned his attention to the glum and ancient Lord Arryn.

The man sighed deeply.

"Our men in Essos have brought us reports of the Targaryen Princes."

Nothing new, and certainly nothing to be so concerned over, if _that_ was all. Robert had been keeping trace, and chasing down, the disgraced Targaryen boys since they first fled Dragonstone with Ser Darry. Nevertheless, obviously, there had to be _more_ to this sordid affair than news of the Targaryen sons soliciting for an army.

Baelish jeered from his seat, threading his fingers through his neatly trimmed beard flecked with silver.

"Do you not mean _Varys's _little birds? Urchins and paupers willing to do and say anything for coin. How can we be so sure they are giving us truthful accounts? We cannot."

Varys was swift in chiding the Master of Coin.

"They have no motivation to lie on this matter, and you know this as well as I, Baelish."

Baelish turned his eyes, voice slick like candle oil.

"There are one hundred reasons to lie, my friend, and each and every one of them was sitting pretty in the coin purse you gave them for their tall tales. Do not misjudge the charm of coin to a man who has none. I believe if we-"

"Enough!"

Robert roared as he slammed the flagon down, cracking the crystal inlay. The Small Council fell silent as night, weary and jaded.

"The Targaryen girl…"

Sluggishly, the King rolled to confront Tywin once more, gaze as pitiless and unyielding as Storm's End itself.

"You told me you searched for her but found naught? Not even a hair? The Targaryen girl was gone, you told me so many moons ago. Worry not my King, for she is as lost as Valyria itself… Dead to the age. Those were your precise words, were they not, Lannister?"

In part, yes. As it was true that Tywin had spent many moons seeking the Targaryen Princess and uncovered nothing but loss and grief and stories of despair. As the Targaryen Princes remerged after the death of Ser Darry, anecdotes of them begging their way through Essos rising, not one word had been said of the Princess.

She was _gone. _

Possibly deceased and decomposing in the Dragon glass caves she never came out of.

The King shook his head, his heavy black hair whipping about his shoulder's like the tail of a war horse, his face curdling like spoiled milk.

"Then it is funny, is it not? For Varys's birds in Essos speak… Haraella, is it not? Yes, Haraella Targaryen has just joined her brothers in Volantis… Together with a fucking _dragon_ the size of the Great Sept of Baelor!"

Suddenly, Robert was reaching for the flagon again, stealing and hurling, and the glass shattered against the wall in all his fury, pouring down in silver rain. Renly winced at the deafening noise, as the rest of the Small Council member's politely averted their gazes.

It was there that Tywin foresaw the truth. The honesty that bellied this was no ill-thought-jest. In the silence that came settling about them like a well-worn cloak.

"Not only did you swear to me that you would deal with the would-be-beggar Princes, you swore that the Targaryen bitch was dead! Did you lie to your King, Lannister?"

The King's tenor irritated Tywin like ivy-rashes on blistered skin. He had his crown because Tywin _gave _it to him. He had his throne because Tywin _let _him have it. He had his legacy secured through Tywin's_ own_ daughter and grandchildren.

Robert Baratheon, without Tywin Lannister, would still be whoring with that insipid wolf-lord of his in the North, bemoaning over his lost love, Lyanna Stark. Everything he had, everything he would have, was owing to Tywin Lannister.

Respect, least of all, was due.

Yet, was this not such a grim turn? One not so easily anticipated? The King, Tywin thought, could have his anger in his confusion.

And Robert _was_ confused.

Perplexed on how he could have sent assassin after assassin after the Princes in exile, and still not have one detached head returned to him. Puzzled on how, despite the many moons spinning through the years, the Targaryen Princess could return, in a blink, with a dragon between her thighs. Mystified on how luck, as fickle a mistress there ever was, could so suddenly turn against him.

"I found nothing. I thought the child dead in the caves with Lady Fig. That is all anyone knew; what anyone saw last of the child… Until today, it seems."

Robert burst.

"Volantis has bent the bloody knee! Folded before the Targaryen's so much as sneezed! Those Valyrian shits were just waiting for this! For their precious Dragonlords to return! To rebuild the Valyrian Freehold! They opened the Black City to them, and even now, gift them the palace as if they were Kings and Queens already! How long will it be before the rest of Essos bows to the Targaryens? How long before that Targaryen bitch gains a fleet to go with her pretty dragon? How long before I have a fucking conquest on my hands, Lannister! Answer me that, and I might let you keep your head!"

Robert's threats were hollow, but his worries?

Less so.

Valyrians… Sorcerers, slavers and sycophants, the lot of them.

The Valyrians of Essos had been seeking to restore the great Valyrian empire for centuries, from the remnants of its ruin in the spectre of the Doom of Valyria. Only five and ten years gone did Volantis send out a fleet to reclaim Valyria.

Undeniably, the fleet went missing as all ships do who sail those cursed seas, but the sentiment remained strong in the remnants of the Valyrian people.

The hope of renewal and reclamation.

As a people of sorcery and magic, old blood coupled with ancient ways, they would see a long thought lost Targaryen, returned from the dead astride a great dragon, as an omen, a spin of _their_ fortune, a _rallying _point.

The Targaryen Princes and Princess would be foolish_ not_ to use that fervour to their advantage.

Tywin would, and, idly, he questioned just how much of his own blood was presently swimming in the veins of the could be monarch. How much gold was in the black?

Not enough with Prince Viserys and Daeron at her ear, surely, whispering away.

Perhaps there was a way to change that…

Robert edged closer, and Tywin could smell the wine deep on his breath, musky as it mingled with his sweat. It seemed he had not slept, only drank his way through the fading stars of the night prior. Though he looked to Tywin, it was to his Council he addressed himself.

"I want this dealt with. I want the Targaryen's _dead_, once and for all. I don't care how much it costs, what any of you have to do, who you have to buy or split asunder… I want those mummers dead, with any Valyrian that gets in the way, and I want that dragon head above my throne! Arryn, come! I need a raven sent swiftly."

* * *

_Arabella Fig's P.O.V_

As if life was a great wheel that span her through the days, Arabella Fig found herself precisely where she had stood so many years ago once the Veil spat her back out. Damp, breathless, in the dark of the caves of Dragonstone.

Only this time, she had no Targaryen babe at her breast, only this time, she _had _been seized by those guarding the docks, men in yellow and black livery. Men who could be loyal to just one House.

_Baratheon._

Only this time, as she was hoisted and dragged to what had once been Queen Rhaella's sitting chambers, Arabella Fig saw just how much everything had… Changed. The Baratheon Stag banner flapped proudly on turrets along the winding Windwyrm to the castle. Aegon's Garden, once so full of life and colour, lain in weed and ruin. The Sea Dragon Tower was a dark spike in the air, unlit and unaired. And, by what glimpse Arabella could sneak, the Sept of Dragonstone was bare and locked, sealed away and left to spoil.

Ghosts walked here, she thought, between what had been and what now was. Ghosts that had been left to fester. Ghosts she could not see, but felt all the same.

Ghosts that were _enraged. _

A Targaryen home nesting no Targaryens… What a sorry sight indeed.

The guards were swift to take her to the steward of this place, to the man who had defiled and smeared his name where it did not belong. To the man resting before the great fireplace of Queen Rhaella's sitting chambers.

He was a tall and powerful man, even in recline. Sinewy of frame, and broad of shoulder, Arabella knew there were very few men in the Seven Kingdoms who would be taller than he. With a fringe of black lying above his dark blue eyes, the beard dusting his well-formed jaw seemingly clung to him like shadows cling to walls.

He was not a handsome man. Not as handsome as Arabella knew his brother's to be, with thin lips that rarely ever smiled, but, she would admit, he _was_ the most frightening of the three. What he lacked in warmth, he made up for in sharp, deadly cunning.

Yes, she knew the man before her. Knew him from a child, when his father, Steffon, used to bring he and his two brother's to King's Landing to play and meet their distant cousins.

By the recognition waxing along the strong plains of his face, he remembered her too.

"You've gotten old."

He had changed, as the world around her had. As there were now Baratheon banners on Dragonstone, guarded by Baratheon men, and a Stag King on a Throne he did not make but took all the same, and everything had changed, and, Arabella thought, it was a little dizzying.

She had spent so many years in the other place, where magic bred cruelty as much as it did heroes, where death could be only just another big adventure, but not here.

Here, in Westeros, death had sharp teeth and a nastier bite.

Here, in Westeros, death was not a thing to overcome or trick or welcome with open arms, as it was to the Wizards.

Here… Death was it's own divinity, a terrible, _terrible_ god.

A god that had, as she knew, oh, how she knew, chosen little Haraella Targaryen as it's unifier.

It's champion.

The Veil would not have let Arabella back through otherwise, surely?

The man stood from his plush seat, a lofty thing of muscle and might.

"So have you, my Lady."

And Arabella Fig was not scared.

Not a little, not much, not at all.

She had seen, and been imprisoned, by crueller men than Stannis Baratheon, and he had worn a bright pink robe of all things.

Instead, she reached up, ignoring the hand locked around her bicep, and fingered the streak of grey at her temple. She was old now, her bones were beginning to ache when the wind chilled. Yet, old she may be, she was not off the chessboard.

Albus Dumbledore had taught her that.

To fear the aged, for they had survived where others, better, kinder men and women, had not.

Stannis Baratheon nodded to the watchmen holding her captive. Immediately, they let go.

"Leave us."

They dithered on their spot, cautious, which only drew a long, suffering sigh from the Baratheon before Arabella.

"I highly doubt Lady Fig is concealing a dagger in that strange sodden dress of hers. And even if she is, I am sure I can protect myself from her assault. All five feet of it. Now leave."

The guards left, trailing out the door, and Arabella took the time between the carven door shutting, and Stannis Baratheon's astute sweep of her person, to glance about her.

"I see much more than the Lord of Dragonstone has changed since I last frequented this dark Keep. I think I prefer it the way it was before, Lord Stannis."

Stannis scoffed, a deep rumble from the chest that sounded uncannily like a garrotted snicker.

"It seems many do. And I am not the only one to have changed. The last anyone seen or heard of you, you were running off into the caves bearing a Targaryen babe. Many believe you dead, Lady Fig. Dead long ago. Yet, here you stand… Alone."

So… Haraella had not come out here. She could not have, if Stannis Baratheon, as subtle as he was, were prodding for an answer to where the babe was.

Good.

_Good. _

Her chin raised, as proud as a rising sun.

"Alone I am now, but not for long."

* * *

_Jaime Lannister's P.O.V_

Jaime Lannister stood above, on the highest landing, looking down to the Sept below, to the men and women and children taking benedictions from the Septon at the feet of the Seven. The children, Joffrey, Tommen and Myrcella, sat at the forefront of the crowd, their rightful place as heirs paramount, and it was to them, to their gleaming golden heads, Jaime stared and stared and stared.

Myrcella, full of soft, gentle, delicate heart, was listening aptly to the droning speech of the Septon, Tommen was fidgeting in his pew, plump and gilded in all the finery his mother adored smothering him in, and Joffrey-

Joffrey was sleeping, slouched in his seat as he were, drooling onto the fine fabric of his shoulder.

That boy grew to be more like his mother each passing morn.

Sometimes, this pleased Jaime beyond what he could say.

Other times it… It _scared _him.

As if summoned by the mere thought of her name, Cersei, Queen to the Seven Kingdoms, Jaime Lannister's twin, and clandestine paramour, came tumbling into his alcove on the landing, goblet of wine stiff in her hand, pressing in tight to his side to peer down the railing to the crowd below, to her children…

To _their _children.

Though they borne the Baratheon name, not a drop of Stag blood tainted their bodies.

Only his sisters… Only _his, _and there was a warped, perverse pleasure to be had in that.

One would think, in such a sacred place, Jaime would burst into flames for all his sins of the flesh. That is what they called what he had done, was it not? An affront to the Gods? _Unnatural_. Perhaps that was why he found such delight in it. To spit in the Gods face. The Gods that had dubbed him Kingslayer, who set him on this path of vice and corruption, who gave as much as they took from him.

He would steal back what little happiness he could find, and if this caused the Gods to cry, then may they fill an ocean.

Naturally, he spoke nothing of this, of the ethics of transgression and the venality of flesh and blood, of Gods and destiny and rivers of sorrow etched deep in his skin like scars. No. Jaime Lannister could never speak of such things, and so, he only smiled.

He only smiled, and occasionally, seldom, he thought of Queen Rhaella and how, if she saw him now, saw the man who stood before the statues of the Gods and snubbed his nose, the Knight who sang her such pretty songs in another life, she too would cry for him, and he, Jaime Lannister, when no one watched, with the stars as his only witness… Wept for her too.

"Already deep in your cups, dear sister?"

Yet, the Queen with a silver smile was dead, her body thrown out into the sea from Dragonstone when Stannis Baratheon seized the Keep, and he was here, Kingsguard, once more in love with a Queen that wasn't his, and no tears could change that. Cersei, his beloved twin, _was_ here, and the Gods would not take another from him. If he damned himself to the Seven Hells for it, then so be it.

There were worse fates than to burn for love.

Cersei did not smile at his jab, nor did she laugh, instead, she consumed what little dregs remained in her goblet and stared down deep at her children below.

"You too would be heavy in your wine if you had heard what I have this morn."

Jaime hummed.

"Has Arryn been squawking into the King's ear again? What songs does he sing this time that has upset you so?"

Her fingers stiffened around the filigree stem of her glass.

"The Targaryen girl lives."

Jaime blinked, and blinked again, and blinked anew. For a flash, he thought of Queen Rhaella, with her soft smile and softer soul, and he… He _hoped._

By the Seven did he foolishly hope.

He loved her; Jaime knew now that he was older, shrewder. In his own way, and not alike the way he loved Cersei. His love for Cersei was all consuming, a pit in his stomach that dragged him down into the soft darkness of bed sheets and secrets, with sweaty skin and shared breathes and fingers so tight they left purple bruises.

He had loved the Dragon Queen like one loves moonlight and dawn and storms out at sea.

Things one can never really touch.

Things one can never really have.

Yet, he knew it was not of the Dragon Queen Cersei spoke. She was gone, and the Gods were callous. Jaime had, certainly, as had most of Westeros, heard of her birthing bed death at Dragonstone, labouring to bring a boy, Daeron, and a girl, Haraella… _Twins_, into the world. The former had been spirited away to Essos by Ser Darry, a once mentor of his own, and the latter, much like her moonlight mother, had gone away.

Dead or missing.

He wondered if the girl had her mothers smile.

A thought Jaime promptly, and doggedly, stomped down to nothing but a mewl in the back of his mind.

It did not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

"I bet that has put our boorish King in high spirits. A Targaryen, to Robert, is one too many… And now he has three just over the sea."

Again, Cersei did not laugh or smile, not as she typically did when Jaime mocked her husband for her enjoyment.

"She has a dragon, Jaime. All the reports say thus, all the little whispers… The Targaryen girl with a dragon has come flying back to nest."

There was a lump in his throat, a lump that burned so sweetly, and curiously tasted of Rhaella's kiss. Like dusk and doom and little deaths.

"I assume the King believes this will make them bold? That an invasion force on our shores is only a matter of time now?"

Cersei sighed, going to sup from her cup once more, but finding it empty, she scowled at the betrayal of wine already drunk.

"Robert believes whatever he wishes too, as he always does. Yet, he is calling his Lords to King's Landing. Essos is not so far away to bring much comfort of whispers of dragons and Targaryens looming in the east. Volantis has already cheered them into their city like the heroes of old."

Jaime found his gaze circling back to the golden trinity sitting below. The Targaryen's in the east would not be so much older than Joffrey, Myrcella or Tommen. A few years at most. What would come of them, his and Cersei's children, should a dragon land on shores that had not seen their kind in an age?

_Burn them all. _

Yet, neither were Aegon or Rhaenys much older when they were slaughtered on the orders of his father, and perhaps the Targaryen's weren't the only ones who dealt in blood and brutality.

Rhaella forgive him.

What a poor lover he was, slaying her husband and his father her grandchildren.

"They are just children. Children who know nothing of true war. They would be foolish to invade so soon."

The glare Cersei levelled his way was hot and heavy.

"They are _Targaryen_."

She said it as if that was all that _needed _to be said. Targaryen children, war mutts and mad rogues, and beyond all hope and chance.

"Mad as their father I bet, with a dragon at their back it does not matter what they know or do not. We cannot allow them to live. We must crush them before they _burn_ us. That is the only language a Targaryen speaks. Fire and inferno, and in so, we must answer in likeness."

Jaime shook his head, hand falling to the pommel of his sword strapped to his hip.

"Perhaps this is all for naught. Perhaps they will stay in Essos, far away. They know nothing of Westeros. The eldest, Viserys, was barely old enough to remember Dragonstone. Say they do come, no House would back their plight. It has been long enough since Robert's Rebellion that the people have forgotten what being under a Targaryen banner means, and it has been too little time for people to forget the loss and grief of war. They will not find the support they need so easily. There is no reason to fret, Cersei."

He reached for her, his golden twin, to hold her and bring them both solace, but Cersei snatched herself away.

"There is every reason to fear! If the Targaryens attack, attack _and _win, my son will lose his legacy! His throne! Is that what you want? My son dead or rotting in the Black Cells while some dragon bitch sits where he should? I knew this was coming… Queen you shall be... until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear… Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds…"

Cersei was quickly lost to him, cornered in some cold and dark memory of her own, hysteric and dazed. Yet, this did not last long, as she finally looked to him, green eyes bright and fierce and, perhaps, a little mad. Similarly as suddenly, she was upon him, so close Jaime could taste the sweet summer wine on her breath, feel the pressure of her breasts against his own breastplate, feel the heat of her palms as she stretched up and cradled his jaw between her hands as if he were something precious.

As if he was something _worth_ love.

"Promise me if war comes you will protect them, Jaime? Promise me you will protect _your_ children. Swear to me thus, swear to me here, before the Gods themselves, or never lay another finger upon me."

It was the one and only time Cersei ever gave voice to the truth.

Their dirty, crooked secret.

He stretched up slowly, rested his own calloused hands against her smooth, unworked ones, and he held on tight, for, to Jaime Lannister, there was nothing else to hold dear.

Before the gods, in their own divine abode, as the effigy of the Stranger looked on, Jaime Lannister swore an oath he, at the time, could not understand the significance of.

"I vow I will protect my children. Come what may, fire or fury, I will defend them. Each and every one, Cersei. You have my word."

* * *

_Eddard Stark's P.O.V_

Eddard Stark lingered on the battlement of Winterfell, snowfall clutching to lash and hair and fur lined cloak, and observed the children playing so merrily down below him in the courtyard. Even this, watching his precious children, did nothing to quell the dread hardening in his heart, or lift the weight of the letter crumpled in his hand.

Arya, so full of spirit and courage, was endeavouring to goad her older brother, Robb, into a fight with the sticks in her hand by jabbing at his legs. Robb, in turn, only laughed at his sister, dodging her increasingly annoyed whips. Sansa was sitting cheerfully under an overhanging pine, beside Septa Mordane, stitching away what appeared to be merry little yellow daisies. Rickard, Eddard's youngest, was playing in the snow, kicking up stones and twigs hidden beneath. Bran, as he often did, was attempting to climb a stack of crates and hay onto a small stable roof.

And there she was, his Lyanna snow, standing much as Eddard did, off to the side by the stables, petting at the snout of a horse, watching the Stark brood through a downturned gaze, but not really a part of the scene of domesticity.

She looked like her namesake.

More than Eddard could have ever wished for.

More than he could bear most days.

She was as wild as the north, the way Brandon and Lyanna had been, cold and far away and desolately beautiful like mountains on the horizon. Stunning but daunting when too close. Yet, her gaze… A dark violet that only shone so in harsh light. Those eyes were not Stark. Not at all, and many whispered, those who took to such gossip, that a Dayne by the name Ashara had given the bastard such a delightful feature.

Ned let them speak.

He let them whisper.

It had been safer that way, for the lie to be seen as real.

It _had _been safer that way.

Eddard Stark, through all his folly and faults, had tried his best to protect Lyanna Snow. He had taken her in, held her close, fed and clothed and housed the face that hurt him so, claimed her as is own, and in so… He might have doomed them all.

Only now-

Ned glanced down to the letter clasped in his gloved hand, the King's seal broken and the parchment thumbed, and he thought, perhaps, maybe, not only had he doomed himself, he had doomed Lyanna too.

The Targaryens would have no love for a Stark, much less a bastard one.

They would hold no compassion for a family that had aided in the slaying of their own.

Nonetheless, it had been war. A vicious and dreadful war. Where father had killed son, and wife and child were raped and brutalized in their beds, and a Stark had bled out and died so far from home, in sands not snow.

Ned, in all his naivety at the time, in all his hot blood and youth, had only wanted to see his sister home. He had only wanted his family whole. He had only wanted righteous vengeance for the-

Only, Lyanna had not been kidnapped, had she?

No.

As Lyanna Snow was not his and Ashara Dayne's bastard?

No.

Robert's Rebellion had _not _been built on a lie. The Mad King had murdered his brother and father, subjugated his people, caused terror and fear to sprout across the land, and though Eddard regretted many things, picking up his sword against that tyrant was not one. However, Robert's Rebellion had _ended_ on a lie.

On Eddard Stark's lie.

A lie that would come undone.

It was happening all over again. Ned could feel it hanging in the air, thick and cloying and reeking of death. Wolves and Stags and Lions against Dragons and Suns and prickly Roses, snarling at each other's throats, baying for blood and throne and…

_Promise me, Ned._

He had. He had promised Lyanna. Promised to protect, and shield, and shelter.

And he would do more still.

_Promise me, Ned. _

_I promise. _

Ned thought he could smell the roses and blood again, smell it so sharply it nearly choked the breath right out of him, and he wished to weep. Weep over old wounds, old losses, old grief.

A letter had never felt so heavy in his hand before.

By the time his children looked up to the battlements surrounding them, Eddard Stark was gone, prowling into the Godswood in hopes the Old Gods would hear him one last time.

He needed their guidance and forgiveness for what he was about to do.

* * *

_Oberyn Martell's P.O.V_

Sunspear was a fenced settlement, guarded by three vast winding walls encircling one another, containing miles of narrow alleys, unseen courts, and raucous bazaars. The Threefold Gate furrowed up just so on the left, avoiding the labyrinth of alleys, and instead allowed for straight passage on a slabbed path to the Old Palace.

It was this path Oberyn Martell stole down that night, the stars bright above his head as if he were crowned by suns from far off lands.

A large, ugly, dun-coloured structure that appeared unnervingly like a dromond jutted up from his right, one of the oldest buildings in Sunspear, the former stronghold of House Martell, the Sandship. Over time, it had been joined by soaring towers of Rhoynish fashion, the slender Spear Tower and the great, domed Tower of the Sun.

The latter, the Tower of the Sun, stored the high seats of the Prince of Dorne, twin thrones adorned with an inlaid spear and the blazing Rhoynish sun. This tower was the first thing visitors to Sunspear saw upon the horizon, whether they came by land or sea, and it was this tower Oberyn made his way to.

Oberyn found his brother, Doran, in his resting Chambers below the thrones. A man in his early fiftieth year, Doran was a cautious fellow, pensive and subtle, and so far from what Oberyn himself was like. Oberyn, too, knew him to be prone to thinking long on matters, weighing every word and every action.

As he was doing that night, dispensing with issues of state behind his regal desk. Doran was, once more, in his wheeled chair, his legs and feet obscured in a lacy blanket, hiding the soft and shapeless form the gout swelled his joints and knees and toes into.

Doran appeared much older than he was, in truth.

Oberyn thought, by the time this night was finished, he would gain another five seasons.

The Seven knew Oberyn himself felt an age older than he did only a few hours therefore.

Prowling up to his brother's festooned desk, Oberyn plunged a hand into the belt of his tunic, plucked free the letter that had caused his great ride from the Shadow City at an ungodly hour, and threw it down before his brother.

Doran did not look up, still hunched over his own pile of parchment, quill scribbling furiously.

"Read it."

Doran's hand gracefully carried on its journey, dipping into an ink well before scratch, scratch, scratching away.

"I am rather engaged currently, brother, and-"

"I would sincerely advise that, whatever has caught your eye, to put it aside and_ read_ that letter."

Gently, Doran placed his quill down, squinting up to meet the dark, dusky gaze of Oberyn. When he only found candour, and perhaps a dash of heat kindled by passion, he stretched out and stole the letter, flicking it open, reading, frown flourishing with each line passed.

Even after he had finished reading, it took Doran a long time to speak.

"Is it true? Can this be verified?"

Oberyn seized one of the plush seats before Doran, there for when the Prince could not leave his personal apartments due to pain and he was forced to entertain guests in this very room.

"That letter is from Varys himself. He would not send such word if he had not checked it thrice already."

Doran's finger tapped away on the desk in the beat of his thoughts, his mind, so quick, so sharp, already constructing and deconstructing proposals and strategies.

Oberyn found it ironic and amusing.

He, the Viper, so dreaded across the land, from the Sunset Sea to the Wall, so much so, most ignored the true serpent slithering in the sand, waiting to strike.

"Does anyone else know of this?"

Oberyn scoffed. His brother had not read the second page to the letter, but he _had._

"The Master of Coin, Baelish, caught wind of the news before Varys could bury it. He informed the Stag's Small Council. King's Landing knows, and no doubt, not before long, the rest of Westeros will be swift to follow."

Naturally, Oberyn did not fault Varys for this. The man had done excellent work for Oberyn's family, secreting gossip of the Stag and his movements for many a moon, for his _sisters _family, and this, this news, could not be capped for long. No, news like this _bled. _It seeped and it oozed, and it was impossible to hold for long, like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands.

"I see."

Yet, a little more time would have been nice.

Oberyn cocked a glossy brow.

"See which piece, brother? The part of the Princess's implausible return to her brothers in Essos? Or perhaps the part where Volantis has kicked open the gate to the Black City and welcomed them in, a near impenetrable fortress where I am sure even the Usurper cannot reach? Or, perhaps my personal favourite, the part where all sources say she flew in on the back of a dragon at least fifty times the size of a man?"

Oberyn's grin was a sharp thing, like broken bone, jagged and keen. Doran scowled at him fiercely.

"Now is not the time for your sarcasm, brother."

Oberyn kicked back in his seat, bolstering his grit coated boots on the edge of the desk.

"No, it is not. Now is the time to _act. _As I have been saying for years. The Lannisters and Baratheons grow fat and old as our sister withers to bones under the ground they walk, and her child, _our _niece, rots alongside her. Now is the time for action, not restraint."

Doran shook his head, the streaks of grey peppering his hair glinting silver in the candlelight.

"Have you forgotten our _own _Targaryen? Must you forget that it was restraint that saved Aegon? If we act now, without thought, without prudence, we risk our nephew before Aegon is ready."

Oberyn's boots fell back to the ground with a terrible thud, a snarl twisting at his face as he rose tall, incensed and impassion over an argument the two brothers had had frequently throughout the years.

"I told you before, years hence, we should have never withdrawn Aegon from his uncles."

Doran's sigh was long, suffering, misery made misfortune.

"And I answered, Oberyn, that as much as I felt for Viserys's and Daeron's predicament, Robert Baratheon _knew _of their survival. His eye was already pulled to them. If we had let Aegon near them, the Stag would have discovered our nephew too, and the mummers corpse he parades over. You know how much he loathes Rhaegar still. Rhaegar's son would have been primacy in his reprisal."

Oberyn knew this. He knew why they had done what they had, the cost of failure, the cost of life. Yet, as a father himself, a man with eight daughters, leaving Viserys and Daeron to fend for themselves in Essos had always… Sat uneasily in his gut, like worms in the mud.

Nevertheless, they had done just that.

For his nephews sake.

For Elia's last surviving child… Oberyn would have damned everyone else, if that were what it took to see Aegon to safety.

He only hoped one day, Daeron and Viserys would understand, understand his love for his nephew, understand and forgive him.

And now Haraella too.

Death by dragon fire was not the fatality Oberyn had envisioned for himself.

No, he much preferred the fantasy of soft, silk blankets and a nice warm mouth down below.

"And yet, now, Aegon does not have a _dragon_, and it seems all our pretty plots are down the privy."

Oberyn did not mean anything against the boy, no one could have foresaw this, but…

Viserys and Daeron would consolidate around their younger sister, and certainly, her dragon in Volantis. From there, they would spread their power, gain strength. Coupled with Viserys's claim to the throne, his mother having crowned him on Dragonstone before her death, they had the upper hand should it come down to infighting over legitimacy and claim.

On the blood-spattered path to the Iron Throne, blood meant less than might, and a dragon…. Well, was there such a mightier creature?

Witnessing Elia's son sitting on his father's throne seemed to be less and less likely.

However, that had never been the true motive, was it?

Not for Oberyn. He would be merely glad if Aegon survived, and lived, and got to be merry as all children should. Without fear of murder, or war, or being hunted for the shade of his hair and the hue of his eyes.

A Targaryen under a Stag was a _dead _Targaryen.

But a Targaryen under a Targaryen…

Doran met his eye.

"Plans can change, brother. Plans can change, as betrothals can. Send for my daughter Arianne. I have a task for her."

* * *

_Catelyn Stark's P.O.V_

Catelyn Stark was convinced she would always, no matter the wolf pups she bore, or the years she spent in this frozen land filled with colder men, feel ever the interloper when she visited the Godswoods of Winterfell. It was a bleak, primal place, comprised of three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years. Sentinels, oaks, and ironwoods closed in tight, with ash, chestnuts, elms, hawthorn and soldier pines interspersing the canopy, deep and dense above her head. In the centre of this primordial land laid a dark and cold pond before an ancient Weirwood heart tree. A tangled thing of bark white as bone, leaves as red as blood, and a long, melancholy face etched upon it.

There was something wild about Winterfell's Godswood; even here, in the core of the castle at the root of the city, you could feel the old gods watching with a thousand unseen eyes.

And Catelyn Stark could not help but feel they saw her soul deep and found her… Lacking.

_Pitiful. _

She did not enter this place often, tried her best to avoid it and the suspicions of inadequacy it engraved upon her chest. However, that evening, dusk sinking down in dull tints of grey, she found herself edging in, searching.

Ned, her Ned, had been seen going in that morn by Jory Cassel, and had yet to come out. Not for supper, not for the children, and not for her, and so, when he would not come, she would go to him.

Catelyn found him where she expected she would. Before the great Weirwood, gazing before the blackened pond. Nevertheless, he was not honing Ice, his House's Valyrian sword, as she had been anticipating. No, Ice was no where to be seen.

A letter rested instead in his limp had, half buried by the swell of his fleeced cloak.

"Ned?"

Eddard Stark had a long face common in those with Stark blood, accentuated by his dark hair being lured back by a leather throng. It was his closely trimmed beard, only just beginning to grey, that made him look older than his five and thirty years. Throughout the years as his wife, Catelyn had come to know his eyes, know them better than her own, a dark grey that reflected his moods, turning soft as fog or as hard as stone.

He was shorter and less handsome than his brother, Brandon, had once been. Still, he had a good sweet heart beneath that solemn face, and to Catelyn that was worth more than any beauty or splendour.

And right then, sitting before his gods, strange old gods that Catelyn feared, that sweet heart of his seemed… _Lost._

Lost and so very far from her straining reach.

Catelyn dared closer.

"My love, what is wrong?"

His gaze fell back to the still, blackened waters.

"Not what is, but what will be."

Catelyn frowned, perplexed by his wistful tone, hesitating at the water's edge. She had not seen Ned this anxious or forlorn since he came home from Robert's Rebellion, carrying that bastard in his arms and-

She would not sully this place, this sacred place, with her hatred for the child born from her husband loins but not her own. The girl, whether Catelyn liked it or not, was a Stark, although, fortunately, she would never hold the name. One merely had to look upon the bastard to know thus.

Whereas Catelyn's own children, her own_ legitimate_ children, Robb and Sansa with their Tully red hair, were less so and-

_No_. Not here. Not now.

Ned held out the letter for her to take, and step by step, Catelyn made it to his side. She took the parchment gingerly, as if it too could burn her as it had clearly burned her Ned, and with each word she read, each line she skimmed, her stomach dropped and her heartbeat skipped.

"Is it true?"

Ned nodded, and Catelyn wished she could weep through the shock freezing her still and motionless to the frost draped ground.

"Robert wants me in the Capital by the moons end. He knows those who do not answer his summons are, even now, siding with the Targaryen's in Essos. It's a test. He believes the Tyrell's have already sent a man to Volantis to entreat with them."

Finally in control of herself once more, Catelyn collapses onto the twisted root Ned sat upon.

"What of the children? You cannot go."

Ned looked to her, looked and beseeched her to understand things she could not.

Things he had yet to say.

"It is _for_ the children that I must."

Catelyn did not argue, she found she could not as much as she longed she could, her tongue something fatty and useless between her teeth.

"Do you think it is true? That they have a…"

She dared not say it. Not here, not ever. Yet, she thought it, she thought it and _feared._

_A dragon. _

She had seen and heard what the Mad King had brought upon them with nothing but wildfire… What could a Targaryen do with a dragon instead?

Terrible, terrible things she thought.

Things never dreamed, and things never said, and things never recovered from.

Ned, her precious Ned, did not hold the same godly fear she did.

"A dragon? Yes. Robert and Arryn would not be so agitated if they did not believe the accounts. It seems dragons have returned to the skies once more. I pray that is the _only_ forgotten nightmare to resurface. I am old, I am weary, and I am not the same green boy I once was."

Catelyn glanced down to the pond before them, right to her glistening reflection. It stared back, a thing that was grim and older than the last time Ned left for the South.

Would he bring another bastard back?

"Do you believe the Targaryen's will invade?"

Ned wavered, snared between wanting to comfort her and telling the truth.

As always with her husband, his honour won out and her comfort, as when he brought that bastard back when many other Lords would have done the kindly thing for their wife and abandoned the runt somewhere unseen, was dropped somewhere low.

Catelyn loved him for it.

She despised him for it too.

"Soon? No. They will establish their power in Essos. It is the shrewd thing to do… But…"

Catelyn winced.

"But eventually the Iron Throne will pull their gazes westward."

Ned's silence was answer enough, and Catelyn found her resolve intoxicating and heady.

"Then it is best to deal with the problem before they can. Stop it before it begins, Ned."

Ned looked to her, really looked, and it was almost as if he were seeing a stranger, and not his beloved wife. It chaffed against Catelyn, it stung too, but she did not waver. Family, Duty, Honour. Those were the words of her House. Family came before Honour in her world, and if the death of three Targaryens secured that, then the gods must will it so.

For she did.

In that moment, she prayed for their swift, swift deaths.

If only her own children would not meet the same end in dragon's fire.

"They are children, Cat. Scared children who likely-"

"As our children are children! You cannot say if the Targaryen's rise and come sailing our way they will not seek vengeance against your family for your role in their downfall. Will you see them burn Robb as their father burned your brother?"

Ned's eyes rolled to a storm cloud grey, and it was, perhaps, the most angriest she had seen him in years.

"You speak of things you do not understand, wife. You can predict the future as much as I. The truth is no one, not Robert, not you, not I, can know what the Targaryen's in Essos will or will not do. Just because they live is not a death sentence deserved. The Mad King took to slaying children for their name, for the sins of the father, without trail or reason… I am surprised, and saddened, you would wish to do the same."

Unexpectedly, Catelyn was awash in shame that stifled her, burned so hot in her veins she felt as if she were set alight already, another star in the sky, another flickering flame blown out in the wind, so potent and strong she could no longer bare looking at Ned, and her gaze tumbled away.

"I only worry."

Her voice was soft, perhaps as lost as Ned's sweet heart. Sighing, Ned slid from his seat at her side and came dropping upon his knees before her, snatching at her hands which had been, without forethought, wringing into the velvet skirts of her dress.

He held her hands in his, large and brown and hardened through harsh duty.

Eddard Stark had the heart of a bard, the hands of a killer, and the honour of a King, and Catelyn had never loved anyone more than she did he.

"I know you worry, as do I. It is dark times that are coming our way, Cat, and we must all be ready. That is why I must do what I do now, as much as it will hurt us both."

Catelyn tried to drag her hands free, as she frowned and blinked and, again, her heart pounded in her chest.

Ned held her steady.

Ned held her true.

And Ned shattered her world.

"Ned?"

He was misty, sad in a way she had only ever seen him be down in the hollows of the Crypts, gazing at his sister's effigy.

"I believe it is time I told you of Lyanna Snow's mother."

* * *

_Tyrion Lannister's P.O.V_

Sprawling across several miles and defended by tall, thin walls, King's Landing was a pox-mark on the otherwise green hills of the Crownlands. Strewn with manses, arbors, granaries, storehouses, inns, merchant stalls, markets, brothels, taverns and graveyards, there was not a vice to be had that could not be quenched in the Capital. Out at the Blackwater Bay, hundreds of quays could be found docked in the harbour, readying for journeys to the far ends of the world.

Clustered around the great city stood three large hills, named after Aegon and his two sister-wives, Visenya and Rhaenys. Aegon's High Hill, surmounted by the Red Keep, the royal castle located in the south-eastern corner of the city, overlooked the bay directly, whilst Visenya's Hill to the west was crowned by the marble-walled Great Sept of Baelor and its seven crystal towers. The Hill of Rhaenys in the north was capped by the collapsed ruins of the Dragonpit dome, its bronze doors shut for a century and a half since the last dragon died.

While the nobles dined on silver plates and fine crystal, the poor smallfolk huddled in the slums of Flea Bottom, a maze of narrow streets and alleys, subsisting on what they called 'bowls of brown'. A mystery stew that could include the meat of rats and murder victims.

And that, those bowls of brown, was what King's Landing truly was, Tyrion Lannister thought.

A place where man ate man, and no one batted an eye.

He was exhausted and dirty from the road by the time Tyrion arrived in this harrowing place, having spent the last ten and six days bumped and jostled and knocked in the back of a litter. Though he was glad to see King's Landing for the first time, in all its horrendous brilliance, he was shrewd enough to be circumspect of his sudden invitation.

Tywin Lannister, his father, had sent a raven not long hence, to Casterly Rock, calling for his youngest sons presence in the capital. Not only was that surprising enough, surprising for the son generally disgraced and overlooked and much preferred dead, what exactly his father wanted with him was left undisclosed in the letter.

The urgency in which Tywin wanted for his son's attendance at his side, combined with his frustratingly obtuse letter set uncomfortably with Tyrion all the way down the King's Road and right into the Red Keep, up until the door of his father's chambers in the highest levels.

By that point, all Tyrion wanted as a good flagon of wine and a soft, downy bed.

His father was awaiting him in the chambers when he entered, staring out the window to the small flecks of people bustling down below. A tall, slender, but broad-shouldered man in his fiftieth year, Tywin was compact but muscular, favouring to keep his head shaved since his golden hair started balding. Still, he had taken to growing out his bushy, golden side-whiskers, as if his he were maned like a lion his House was known for.

First and foremost, Tywin was a calculating, intelligent, politically astute, ruthless, and controlling man. A man who had dedicated his life and efforts towards maintaining the Lannister prestige, ensuring House Lannister was respected, admired, or preferably to his father, _feared. _

He was a proven battle commander nearly two wars over, a man who lead from the rear, and with a powerful presence not easily glanced over, he was an intimidating figure of all regards. Cruel with disloyalty, and with a deep loathing for laughter, the only time it was said that Tywin Lannister smiled was with his dear wife, Joanna.

Until Tyrion was born and snatched that one light from him.

Tyrion closed the door behind him, ambling in and over to the desk at the far wall, his short legs stiff and swore from the long, cramped ride in the carriage, and poured himself a goblet of wine awaiting ready at the corner.

"And what do I owe this honour? It is not every day my father calls me from the dark shadows of Casterly Rock where any man or women could see me and snicker at the littlest Lannister."

Tyrion couldn't help taking the shot. He had heard the news, of course he had, half the Kingdom was in a furore, the whispers of the smallfolk, the dithering of the nobles on his journey, and certainly, all the loose tongues in the taverns he had momentarily stopped at to slake his thirst.

Dragons graced the skies once more, it appeared.

Along with a thought dead Targaryen.

Only this, this impossibility, was enough for Tywin to pull Tyrion out into the open. To risk the scorn of being seen with a dwarf son. It was one thing knowing, but for people to see… It _would_ hurt, Tyrion thought, if he were not used to this, or he did not find any discomfort to Tywin Lannister amusing.

Yet, as sure as he knew Tywin startling want of Tyrion's presence, and this surprising news of a dragon were linked, how exactly that knot was tangled was still unclear, and where he, Tyrion Lannister, fit into it all was anyone's guess.

Though he could not see Tywin's face as it was bowed to the window, Tyrion knew he was scowling.

When was he not?

A life without laughter or smiles… How miserable.

"Do not play your games with me, Tyrion. I am in no such mood. You are here for one reason only. Duty to your family."

Tyrion supped from his cup, one light, almost white, brow arching high.

"And what does this duty entail, perchance?"

Finally, Tywin turned to face him, and immediately recoiled on sight.

It was the eyes that did it, Tyrion thought.

His own Seven damned eye.

One as green as his fathers, the other as black as night that sometimes… occasionally shone violet.

His father hated, perhaps, that black eye as much as he hated anything else about Tyrion.

Marching to his desk, Tywin collected a letter written in his own hand, preserved in the wax and seal of House Lannister. Unceremoniously, he extended the limb out, long and muscled, and carried the letter out for Tyrion to take into his own care.

Tyrion took it with his free hand as he imagined one would take poison. Quickly, in one gulp, in a wish that it would all be over soon.

When Tyrion was busy taking another sip of wine, turning the letter over in his hand, his father struck.

"You are to be sent by ship to Volantis, where you will find and hold court with the Targaryen's keeping there. Once you arrive, you will give Haraella, the recently returned Princess, that very letter you are holding."

Tyrion spewed his wine down his tunic, choking on not only a swallow gone wrong, but surely a very poor jest.

"Pardon me?! I am sure I didn't quite hear that correctly."

Tyrion had always longed to see a dragon. He dreamt of them as a child, a small, dwarf boy with no love and no companions, soaring in the clouds, finally free… Yes, he had wished and wished and wished as a boy, but that wish had never contained the possibility of being _eaten _by one, given their families history.

"You heard me perfectly clear, Tyrion. Your ship leaves the harbour this night, and I do not want anyone knowing of your journey, so, until then, here you stay with me. Where I can keep an eye on you until your departure."

Slowly, Tyrion placed his goblet down on the edge of the desk.

"Father, there are easier ways of having me killed then sending me bound and buffed to a dragon and a surely half-mad Targaryen frothing at the mouth for Lannister bones to gnaw! If needs must, I'll give you the coin for an assassin myself."

Tywin sneered at him, disgusted, gaze drifting and holding to his own dark eye.

"I am not sending you to a half-mad Targaryen to be eaten or burned by a dragon… I am sending you to your niece to indenture yourself to her side, and ease whatever misbegotten spite the Princes are currently filling her head with."

Tyrion blinked.

"Niece? What is Myrcella doing in Volantis with-"

Tywin waved a hand flippantly, brushing off whatever words Tyrion were to speak.

"Not Cersei's child, you fool! Jaime's!"

Tyrion bit down hard on his retort. The little voice in his mind that wanted to say isn't Myrcella Jaime's too? Yet, that was a secret for another time, a cryptic surely his father knew as well as he did, for even he couldn't be so blind to his perfect twins, the sullied Lannister secret, and, idly, he was currently more muddled and anxious for his own scheduled meeting with a fucking _dragon_ to be overly concerned with matters of incest and family spoils.

"The last I knew, Jaime had _no_ children, as a sworn brother of the Kingsguard."

Tywin's jaw wound tight, muscle jumping as he chewed back anger like one sucked marrow from bone.

"He has no… Legitimate children, no."

The spark lit like a forest fire burning in his mind, a mind always too swift, too clever, too much like his father's.

Tyrion pulled back, head shaking, pale blonde curls, only the barest of gold, bouncing.

Surely not?

"You are not saying what I believe you are, are you, father?"

Perhaps it was his use of the title father, which Tyrion had used less and less throughout the years, or perhaps it was the quasi-beseeching tone his pitch took, but Tywin met his gaze head on, truly looked at him and saw-

Saw _something._

Something he, for once, just one moment, decided to be honest with.

"Jaime had relations with Queen Rhaella that I believe have… Spawned a child. A child that reappeared not a moon cycle ago."

Jaime wouldn't be so foolish-

Jaime _would_ be so foolish, and the gods hated him just enough to ensure his babe quickened in the belly of a bloody Targaryen.

What monstrosity had his brother wrought into this world already so broken? A beast of scale and mane? May the gods have mercy on them all.

Still, all sincerity, concern or candour Tywin fleetingly gave, it was as swiftly snatched away again as his father stood, and loomed down over him.

"It matters not. You, Tyrion, for once in your sorrowful life, will do your family proud. You will take that letter to the Targaryen's, and you will meet your niece. Or, I swear to you, a dragon will be the least of your worries."

* * *

**A.N: **Longest chapter yet! You are either going to really enjoy this chapter, or hate everything about it and never read any of my work again lol. As a wiseman, Lord Farquaad, once said: Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to take. No, in all honesty, this was so much fun to write and I do hope most of you enjoyed it.

I do not know when we'll be touching back with these character's P. again, as I really want to focus on the Targaryens (Viserys, Daeron, Haraella, Aegon, Lyanna Snow, and one more I don't want to give away just yet but I'm sure a few of you have already guessed). That said, we will eventually come back to them, and the stuff discussed/disclosed this chapter obviously comes into play throughout the fic.

As for the questions asked in the reviews, if I have not explicitly answered your question by P.M, it means it's part of the plot and I don't want to spoil anything. I hope you all understand, and know that I am not ignoring you.

**Well, that's it kids, **thank you all for the follows, favourites and all the lovely reviews! I hope this chapter has made her smile as all your kind words have, and I will hopefully see you all soon. _~AlwaysEatTheRude21 _


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